Ballad of a second-class axe

Not long, not far: just 938 steps.

Out the door into the crisp cold of winter’s morning, the snow hard under foot. Not cold enough for a hat, but a solid yes to gloves. Open the shed and pick up the secondclass axe. (The first-class axe is for splitting, only.) The second-class axe used to be the first-class axe until the handle splintered, and I inexpertly replaced it — now, despite repeated efforts, the axe head often threatens to depart its new handle.

So I use it for limbing and cutting paths, carrying it with my hand directly behind the axe head. Sometimes, I drive it straight head-down on a stump, as though one lucky strike will lock the axe head in place again. That never works for long.

Down into the valley where the brook curls in and through summer’s four-foot-high yellow grass. A second-hand sand-brown oilskin coat stiff with the cold, and I’m hoping I don’t look too much like a moose from a distance.

I want to build a path down to where the old house’s reservoir — little more than a widening in the brook — chuckles in tight against the hillside, where the water moves fast enough falling over the stone dam to make a short stretch of cobble and sand and where the flow is also enough to make water’s sound. I might put a bench there, make a trail to join the two paths

that run down into the brook valley and then head their separate ways. I might do many things. I might do nothing. That’s all fine.

The axe head is as cold as the inside of the shed was overnight, and when I set it down, snow neither melts onto the metal nor sticks to it. It was a cold night, the sky clear and wide open, the stars hard after the snow stopped and the cloud scudded east.

It’s that peculiar snow that make you think it was the genesis for the idea of hanging icicles on Christmas trees; the snow fell wet, and then froze in place like frosting on a gingerbread house. It’s still cold, but the sun’s out, so the snow on the branches is melting and then forming into hanging clear icicles from the branch tips. So, every deciduous tree is wrapped in hard white scale, and every evergreen is decorated with sun-lit icicles.

The high grass is all knocked down now, and the few scant inches of snow are enough to tame the tangle of the blackberry and the ground-cover rose bushes with their small bright orange rosehips. It’s hard to believe that you’d even need a path, it’s so wide open. But the valley was forage, and the yellow hay that was planted here comes back every year to shoulder-height, and in late summer it seems almost trackless, right across to the other side where the trees start again.

My coat is worn, my gloves are worn and the sticker on the side of the axe handle is worn away to a long black smear of stubborn adhesive.

There’s no wind, not even a hint of wind, and the snow’s too recent and too hard for anything to have left tracks. Except me — I leave ragged-edged tracks along the side of the brook, to the gap in the trees where the trail ends, then back around the loop to the shed and the back of the house.

There’s a crow somewhere, calling, but no emails or texts.

935 steps — 936 — 937.

The second-class axe got out for a walk, and did no work.

The splitting axe stayed in the shed, waiting in the shed-light halfdark.

It’s not always in your favour to be the best.