Man, I feel burly

For the second afternoon in a row today, I helped Vincent and his father, who looks remarkably like Belle's dad in Beauty and the Beast, haul around wood. They were felling branches from several huge trees on the farm to make firewood. (Vincent's and his parents' adjacent houses are both heated entirely by wood all year.)

Vincent and I started out by throwing big logs and fat branches, which he had cut yesterday, into a wagon attached to the back of a tractor. I'm not sure why, but somehow, tossing huge logs was the most entertaining thing I've done in awhile. They were all somewhat heavy and unwieldy, and there was immense satisfaction in pitching them all the way to the back of the wagon to pile the wood evenly, and in keeping up with Vincent while doing so. It brought me back to childhood summers spent flinging mud balls at the neighbor kids and building forts in the bushes with my brother.

I alternated throwing the big logs into the wagon with picking up smaller branches and hurling them onto the top of a pile that will be used to make wood chips for compost. Some were teeny, but others looked like small trees in their own right. I had a sudden, strange urge to find a red and black flannel shirt and eat flapjacks. Fortunately, I reconsidered the flannel part pretty quickly. Maybe my next project should be to train for the Highland games (except for the part about the kilt).

When Vincent and his pop had finished carting off all the logs from a tree or two, Vincent used a robotic claw on the front of the other tractor to pick up all the smaller branches still littering the ground and move them onto the little branch pile. It was SO COOL. I'm sure that my awe was not unlike what three-year-olds all over America feel when they go through their "construction worker" phase. With the claw in action, the tractor stopped looking like farm equipment and took on the semblance of a toothy dinosaur, or the huge Power Ranger thingie that they turned into when it was "morphin' time":