No More Chopping Wood

Ah............the wood pile! Spring is here. The splitting maul sits almost unused. We heat our house entirely with wood. We used to have four tough sons at home who chopped it for us, but now we are down to the last son as the other four are grown and gone. He is 17, and gets all the honors. I'm afraid he is deprived because he doesn't have the company of his brothers to share the work.

Rememer when you were young and you had a big or yucky job to do, and it was a good memory because of the fun you had because of the company that was with you? I remember when I was about eleven or twelve and my aunt (who was my best friend and less than 5 years older than me) had to go outside in the pouring rain and work with the sewer snake running through the basement window.

Our sewer was plugged up. My dad rented one of those big coiled sewer snakes and was running it through the main sewer connection inside the basement to get us unclogged. I was too young to understand exactly why we had the setup we had, but the snake ran out the window and we had to probably feed it in to dad, and pull it back out over and over until he was finished. It STUNK! It was gross. It was pouring rain, and we were so miserable. She had come to stay with me for a day, and it was supposed to be fun.

But even now, almost forty years later, we laugh if we talk about it, and it's a funny memory.

I was the oldest grandchild in the family and she was the youngest daughter of my grandparents. My aunt and I always got the dirty jobs. When there was a family get-together, we always washed all the dishes. When we had a big chicken butchering day, with dad and all his brothers, guess who cleaned the 200 stinky gizzards of all those chickens? (By the way, they DO smell bad.) And yet now, we laugh about it because we shared it together.

Writing this, I realize that my son is deprived. And so is everyone else's who hasn't experienced hard times with great friends. How can we fix that? Hmmmm.......