A Day in the Country: Maggie Mackellar and The Farmer rediscover the joys of wood splitting.
THE MERCURY IS DROPPING AND MAGGIE MACKELLAR’S WOOD SHED IS EMPTY. TIME TO REDISCOVER HER LOG-SPLITTING SKILLS.
IN THE SECOND WINTER of my widowhood I split wood. I had moved back to the family farm bringing with me a distressed seven-year-old, an out-of-control toddler and an ancient Jack Russell. My mother was dead. My husband was dead and practically everything in my life felt impossible. But in the midst of the impossibility I was lucky. I had the chance to take a breath. I moved into the small flat on the edge of the garden where my aunt and uncle lived. It was the farm my mother and her siblings were raised on and where I had come since I was a baby. It was home. It was also freezing.
The only heating in the little flat was a wood heater. My uncle, grasping the situation, said he’d get the wood, I’d just have to split it. In the early days, when I was really raw, he split it for me. I’d find a wheelbarrow full outside the door. But as the winter deepened I would head to the woodpile, grasp that old splitter and flail away.
There is an old saying that wood warms you twice. Once when you split it and the second time when you burn it. This was my life. For the next seven winters my uncle would dump the logs (god bless him) and I would split them.
Then I moved to Tasmania. Down here the fire burns for three months longer. The Farmer resolutely holds out until April to light the big wood heater in the courtyard, which burns 24 hours a day until October. But I’ve been spoiled; I haven’t had to split wood for years. When my son was a teenager it became his job to get wood, which meant I just had to make enough noise and the wood shed was full. But the teenage boy has grown up and is 4000km away on a cattle station in Queensland, and my wood shed is empty.
So this winter, the winter of our empty nest, The Farmer and I are spending our weekends wood hooking. We head up to a patch of bush in one of the back paddocks, and while he selects a dead tree I secure the dogs and watch from a safe distance. After the tree is down, we set to work. He uses the chainsaw and I follow behind with the splitter. It’s not long before my beanie is flung aside, my woollen jumper peeled off. Once the wood is split we load the ute. This new job of wood hooking is something I am embracing. I love being out in the bush. Love seeing a pair of scarlet robins watch us work. And love a full woodshed.
The house is quiet with just the two of us. The winter evenings are long and it’s become our routine that The Farmer sets the open fire while I make the salad. We carry our dinner in to sit in front of the crack and spit of the flames and are both warmed twice. I am sure at some stage in my life I’ll be glad to flick a switch and be warm. But for now, I’m grateful for my health, for a farmer who knows how to fell a tree and for my own hard-won knowledge in swinging an axe.