The week of the funeral, Dale came by with his truck.
Dale is Jim’s older brother. Three years older. He lives half a mile down Otter Creek Road from us, by himself. He does mechanic work out of the pole shed behind his house.
“I’m going to take the splitter down to my place,” he said, standing in my yard. “For safekeeping. You’re gone on that propane truck all day, and the boy’s at school. Somebody’d have that hooked up and gone in two minutes.”
I said thank you.
I would have said thank you to anybody that week.
Then it was summer, and I didn’t think about firewood at all.
I drive a bobtail for the co-op. Three thousand gallons. I took every single hour of overtime they’d give me all summer long.
Because a widow’s arithmetic isn’t complicated.
There’s one paycheck now. That’s all the arithmetic there is.
By the first of October, I was thinking about firewood.
People think it’s funny that the woman who delivers their propane heats her own house with wood.
It’s not that funny.
I know what propane costs better than anybody on my route. We have a furnace. But we also have a wood stove in the front room that Jim put in the year Cole was born. And that stove is what we live on all winter.
Jim had left about six face cords split and stacked under the lean-to from the year before.
Up here, when we say a cord, that’s usually what we mean. A face cord. A stack four feet high and eight feet long and one stick deep. About a good heaped pickup load.
Six of those would get us to about Christmas.
What I had plenty of was rounds.
Two winters back, Jim dropped nine red oaks along the north line of our property. The oak wilt was coming through, and he wanted to get them down before they died standing.
The fall before he died, he bucked every one of those oaks into sixteen-inch rounds. Then he lined them all up along the fence on pallets.
They’d been down two years now. The ends were checked and gray. They were as dry and ready as oak ever gets.
There was a long, long row of them.
And every single one was too big to fit in my stove.
You can split red oak with a maul. I’ve done it.
But I can’t swing a maul through fifteen cords of oak. Not in the handful of weekends I had left before the ground went white.
So on Friday night, I called Dale and told him I’d be down in the morning to get the splitter.
“Come on down,” he said. “We’ll talk about it.”
Now I knew what there was to talk about.
Specialty: Emotional Turning Points
Rachel Monroe writes character-driven stories about betrayal, second chances, and unexpected resilience. Her work highlights the emotional side of family conflict — the silences, the misunderstandings, and the moments when someone quietly decides they’ve had enough.