When I was a child and teenager, I hated nothing more than when my mother would say “It’s time to go work outside in the yard!” My brother and I would groan and grumble, because we would be forced to spend hours in the garden, digging, planting flowers, etc. We never got to do the fun stuff, like mow the lawn, oh no, we had to do the grunt work my mother didn’t want to do, but she had to have the shit ton of flowers and all of the colour. Ugh.

Yesterday, she said she wanted to cut down some branches of these big bushes along the property line and burn them, so I said, “OK,” and grabbed a hand saw. Yes, I could have used the chainsaw, but I also figured it would be a great workout if I used the hand saw, so hand saw it was. My mother was hacking away with some pruning shears on limbs that were way too large to use the shears on, Little Man walked back and forth between us, picking up large sticks and just adventuring, and I was diligently sawing away at the large dead branches I could find.

When we had a good stack of branches, my mother decided it was time to start carrying them down the the fire pit. She disappeared as I was dragging a big limb down, and as I started to saw it into manageable pieces to place in the fire pit, my brother appeared with his “Not a Flamethrower” to start the fire. He made a nice little fire and then went back inside to get some work done and answer a few calls, and my mother grabbed Little Man, sat him in the passenger seat of the smaller ATV, buckled him in, and drove him back and forth from where we had been cutting to the fire, dropping off loads of branches for me to cut smaller and add to the fire.

About this time, my dad came out and grabbed the chainsaw, and proceeded to make quick work of the remaining bushes. I stayed down at the fire for another hour and a half, cutting everything up smaller, adding them to the fire, stirring everything around once in a while. I love the smell of a wood burning fire, and yesterday was no exception. The downside is that I had taken a nice long shower in the morning, before I took a quick run into town, so I smelled like fire the rest of the day, as I did not want to take a second shower. So, I went to bed smelling like burning wood. Oh well; it was worth it.