As I write this, the wood in the photo above is sitting in the 2020 bay of our new woodshed. We got started on stacking the wood this weekend, with a little help from our friends, and finished stacking all of our cut wood this afternoon. It’s surprising, seeing how much wood we’ve cut over the last four years.
The 2020 pile is the biggest, and the 2018 pile is so far the smallest, as I raided it for warmth when the heating kept packing up in winter 2020 while my husband was recovering from his second major operation in the space of four weeks, huddled up in bed and feeling cold and unwell. Not a problem, as we still have the largest chunks of the century old walnut tree to be cut into stove-sized chunks.
The whole stacking project has been a personal history lesson. The 2018 wood came from our huge cedar tree – a large branch fell off in January 2018 under the weight of the snow, and we called in a tree surgeon to thin the tree. He took out a large dead tree overlooking the road at the same time, and found that the trunk was 1) hollow and 2) full of stinking water. There’s also three chunks of the dead fir tree we felled for my father just hours before he took his last fall and broke his hip. The 2019 wood was greengage and pear. The 2020 crop was the lightning-struck cedar that was brought down by a storm in December 2019 while we were both too ill to deal with it. The 2021 pile is bigger than we realised – so far, comprising a half-dead greengage and a plum tree, it’s not finished yet. Any one of the trees we need to fetch down next will fill an entire bay.
The woodshed is now full of drying wood, and we’ve been relaxing. Not quite relaxing. I signed up for a fourteen day script writing challenge that turned out to be TV or film scripts rather than the theatre / radio scripts I prefer, and was up till silly o’clock writing the first script a fairly gruesome story about a wife getting free of her domineering husband in a pretty nasty way (no, she didn’t stab him). The second prompt has arrived now, and I’m still thinking grim ideas, so I think the Scriptly folk will be hesitant to open my files by the end of the fortnight.
Julia Chalkley 
Did the wife take up a chainsaw and build a big woodpile, by any chance? I’m loving this trip around your garden, tree by tree. Are you planting new ones to replace the old?
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We usually do plant new trees each year, though the new trees are about our height and the felled ones are as tall as the house, not that we can plant sixty foot tall trees. We did put in 1,200 saplings around the borders as a hedge in 2002 and 2003, so we’ve paid our debt to the trees somewhat.
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And the wife accidentally summoned the Spirit of the Kitchen, which responded by throwing the knife block across the room. Ouch.
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