“Wood keeps you warm three times: When you cut it, when you stack it, and when you burn it.”

I tried to maintain my composure and refrain from rolling my eyes. I know he was right, and there was an element of romanticism in that philosophy, but I wasn’t looking forward to going out into the cold again.

I knew he was right, but despite my appreciation for the sentiment on a philosophical level, I knew pragmatically he was just backing up my dad. Grown-ups always seem to support one another in matters of disagreements with children.

The guy with the maxim was my dad’s hired hand, a man named Richard, I think, but my dad just called him “Hippy” because of his long hair, mustache, and tendency to smoke pot recreationally. I’m not sure if he appreciated my father’s choice of moniker for him; it certainly felt a little overbearing and a bit of an overstep to me, and I certainly wouldn’t like to b e identified by the stereotype/archetype to which I most closely resemble, but he didn’t seem to mind much. Part of that may also have been because my dad was his boss, which is a slightly more complicated situation.

And part of that may have just been the aforementioned weed.

But the fact remained that I was being summoned to don a snowsuit and venture off into the woods to watch my father cut down a selection of trees, until he was satisfied, which was always far behyond what my body could comfortably handle. My extremedies became numb very quickly, and my frame couldn’t sustain repeated lifting and throwing and stacking.

That never seemed to slow my dad down, though. He always boasted about the merits of working on a farm when he was younger, and how it spurred a work ethic, which my dad often mispronounced as “worth ethic”. I always found it to be a little close to boot-licking subservience to The Man, but I can’t say I didn’t admire his drive to keep going when all motives and aspirations were self-imposed.

I took a deep breath and opened the door from the basement into the garage. The door had a tight seal, so it was like breaking the airlock of a space ship before bracing the frozen Hoth-like wasteland of upstate New York.I stomped/pranced/trudged through some of the fresh snow from the night before and made my way over to the grey Ferguson tractor and wood wagon.

Years ago, my grandfather would take me on rides through his woods on that tractor. I remember holding my breath as the tractor traversed a wooden bridge over a small marsh, and smelling buttercups sniffing and inhaling just deeply enough to end up with some small ants uncomfortably inside my nostrils.

There weren’t any ants or daisies or buttercups around today. I jumped up to the wood wagon and put my hand on the bar spanning across the walls of the cart like it were the reigns of a dog sled, and I planted my feet near the bits of bark and sawdust and moss that peppered the packed, but bright snow.

My dad came out to join me. The metal seat squeaked quickly and familiarly when he tipped it down and too his place on it, then the tractor sputtered to life, and in a jerky jolt forward, we began moving. We accelerated to a smooth, fast pace. The hulking rear wheels of the tractor were spinning and chained, fast and yet the radius of them let my eyes focus on them. We dipped into the woods.

Details to get into — swapping gloves, cold face and branches, sticks, getting stuck sometimes. Scanning the treeline for dead trees, de-suiting in the basement. Slipping my iPod into my suit. Not liking the chainsaw. The method for felling a tree with aluminum wedges. The nobility with which he would talk about exercising control over direction.