Run Out of Firewood
I’m fixing to run out of firewood.
It’s difficult to think about stacking yourself up a couple of cords of split hardwood when the weather is still hot and humid in September and October. So you put off the task of finding, purchasing, hauling and stacking up enough so that the mere site of it would be comforting to gaze upon, knowing that it meant warmth and survival when the frigid times fell upon us.
Running out of firewood in freezing weather when the power goes out is as catastrophic as running out of money after the food goes out.
The very thought of running out of firewood brought to mind a time when I was still a young lad, a time when the power had been out for two days, a time when everything was frozen over and the wind was so bitterly cold until it was dangerous to venture out in it—and we had run out of firewood.
We shivered around those cold ashes, all wrapped up in quilts, until burning the furniture was not a question anymore. The question was what would we burn first. My daddy broke up the wooden chairs first, reasoning that we could sit on the floor, but we couldn’t burn the floor, at least not yet.
After that it just got colder and the sleet pelted the roof and the sides of the house with more intensity, promising no relief from the killing weather.
By early the next morning everything in the house that would burn had been broken up and used as fuel to stave off freezing to death. But still, we could hear the cracking of the trees outside and feel the needles of icy cold bearing down through our quilts. We decided that before our hands got too numb that the only thing left to do was to start ripping up the boards from the floor.
So we thought.
My Uncle Alvin and Aunt Cleo had taken refuge with us the day before because they had run out of firewood before us, and at this critical time my aunt offered a better solution than ripping up the floor beneath us.
We voted on it and everyone voted in the affirmative except one, and that was Uncle Alvin, who was cussing up a blue streak, calling us all low-down dirty dogs when Aunt Cleo informed him, “Alvin, we done voted and it passed and we are gonna burn it! You can take it loose or you can keep it strapped on, regardless, we are gonna burn it!”
Uncle Alvin had served in the U.S. Army over in the recent war in Korea, or rather the “Korean Conflict” as the government had called it. Unfortunately during his service Uncle Alvin had gotten his left leg shot off.
The government lived up to its role and had provided him a replacement for his leg.
Unfortunately, it was constructed of wood, and that was the object we had all voted in the the affirmative to use as fuel to prevent the ice from creeping in on us.
A big fight broke out. Unsurprisingly, Uncle Alvin strongly objected to having his leg turned into ashes, and he turned his wrath upon my aunt, as well as the rest of us.
The heat of the argument succeeded in warming things up a bit, but soon the accusations and protests wound down as even Uncle Alvin realized that our frosty breaths would soon be icy breaths unless he consented to lend us a hand, or rather, a leg.
Shortly after we tossed my uncle’s leg on the fire, the storm began to abate and we were all fixing to be saved from freezing because we were a leg-up on the situation.