The benumbing purgatory of hope on hold

I should be making sure my firewood’s all put in just now. Cutting the 12-foots of heavy spruce and lighter fir into fire logs after they’ve sat all summer drying, putting the round junks up on my splitting log and axing them into sections, quarters and halves and random shapes where the axe cleaves around the knots of branches. Letting the last of the wet dry from the wood before its date with the wood stove.

It’s a long job: the shed fills in wooden increments. But progress is measurable, always.

Strong-smelling sticky pitch on my work gloves and on my clothes, each armload just a short walk away from winter warmth, my blue jay bosses sitting and squawking along the edge of the woodshed’s roof.

Stacking the shed-wood in the chill of early mornings with the frost white outside and glinting on the chevroned grass blades, building the latest new log pile as a bulwark against the coming cold.

That’s what I love about fall, oddly: the bull mechanics of firewood and the fine-fingered smell of first fires. When you get those first few hints of fall smoke on the wind, and try to figure out what kind of wood it is. Is that the sharp clean smell of pine? One note, but a wondrous high and clear one. The dusky dirtiness of American dogwood, the brassy smell of pin cherry, the almost blacksmith smudge of spruce? I look for all of them, nose angling high like a dog seeking rabbits, catching and analyzing, wondering where the source is.

By now, with the fall rains coming, I should even be beyond stacking, and should have moved on to calculating the architecture and top-weighting of woodpile tarpaulins. The rope-origami of lashings and threading through grommets, the frustration level of knots that delight in their own self-loosening

I should be making kindling from the driest logs, getting the slash ready for wet fall burning,

It’s the sheer doing of it all that I love. And now, the sheer frustration of waiting to be able to do any of it.

Because this year, I’m not. Instead, I’m waiting.

Because, this year, life.

I’ve written a fair bit about the sudden disaster of having our old house in Newfoundland burn down — something like a wildfire is remarkably here-and-gone, a kind of punctuation mark that’s inked heavy with finality. You chew it over a lot, especially at night: why it had to happen, why chance saved some neighbours and not others, why there was wind that day and why it was coming your way. It’s a short spark that shocks, again and again, every time you try to forget it, bingo, it’s back again.

But if the realization of the sharp end of a personal crisis, even relived repeatedly, is one thing, the long, drawn-out haul of what comes afterwards is something else altogether.

Nobody tells you in advance how much of an emergency is actually near-stasis: waiting in place for that next insurance adjuster. That next permit. That slot in a builder’s schedule. Waiting for lumber delivery. Waiting for plans. Waiting for concrete. Waiting. Waiting for the next building season.

And the purgatory of waiting isn’t restricted to a catastrophe like a fire. Any other number of unclosed loops can be just as frustrating — especially as you fumble to thread even the simplest single one of them.

Medical emergencies, legal battles, troubles with getting supports or treatment for your kids? It’s awful how much you can fall asleep gnawing on even just one small facet, and then wake up on a morning two weeks later and find you have had not made even one inch of forward motion. Often, progress is defined only as escaping a backwards slide.

Waiting to see if the latest prescription does what it was prescribed to do, or whether instead it has you crawling the bedroom, trying to somehow pry a migraine from behind your eye. Waiting for the next doctor’s appointment. Waiting — sometimes seemingly endlessly — for your place in line for that needed diagnostic test. Waiting for diagnosis to return, or to see if treatment to take hold.

Waiting for winter. Waiting for spring.

I know what that’s like. And I chafe. Days — days and weeks and months, and I fear, years — are fleeing.

So, I’d say one simple thing. We’ve all seen someone blow apart in public: we’ve seen them react in a way that was unexpected and vastly over the top, set off by something that seems like such a small issue. But you don’t know. You don’t know if they’re dealing with Thing No. 1, Thing No. 97 or even just Thing No. 1 for the 90th time.

Save a little spare and handy compassion — always. You don’t know how their firewood’s doing.

Firewood. The crazy-quilt pattern of stacked split firelogs, the smell of the drying junks in the woodshed. Hanging the axe up: bedding the chainsaw down in its orange plastic case, redolent of wood chips and chain oil. Remembering the autumn mantra of the woodshed of simple peace.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor of the Free Press. Be nice to him: he’ll try to be nice right back. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca