Here’s how it works, if you’ve never done it.
You set a round on the beam, up against the foot plate. You pull the lever. The ram pushes the round slowly into the wedge, with twenty-seven tons of pressure behind it.
The oak groans.
And then it lets go with a crack you can feel in your back teeth.
Red oak splits clean and straight. It smells sour when it opens up. Like vinegar. That night, you smell it in your hair.
One of us fed the rounds and ran the lever. The other one pulled the split pieces away and stacked them.
You don’t talk much, because of the engine.
You just go.
By one-thirty, we had the first face cord split and stacked in the bed of the truck. Heaped up and tight.
By two-thirty, we had the second one stacked on the ground beside it. And my shoulders were starting to talk to me.
Around three o’clock, I went into the lean-to to get the water jug.
And I saw the wall.
I’d seen it a hundred times. I just hadn’t looked at it since April.
On the bare studs inside the lean-to, right next to where the splitting maul hangs on its nail, Jim kept a list. Written in carpenter’s pencil.
He started it the very first fall we lived in that house. And every October, he wrote over it again to make it darker. So now it stood out black against the gray wood.
Mrs. Hartmann, one cord.
Donna Peterson, one cord.
Marlene Olson, one cord.
Three widows on Otter Creek Road.
Mrs. Hartmann lives at the very far end of the road, past the creek. She’s eighty-six. She taught fourth grade at the elementary school in town for thirty-four years.
Donna Peterson’s husband went through the ice on a snowmobile when their kids were small.
Marlene Olson lost her husband, Art, to cancer. Her hip is so bad she can’t carry more than three sticks of wood at a time.
Every October, for as long as Jim and I were married, he split their wood first. And ours second.
He delivered it. He stacked it on their porches. And he wouldn’t take one single dime for it.
He’d take a pie. If the pie was already made.
That was his whole rule.
I stood there in the lean-to holding the water jug. And I counted the daylight.
We had the splitter until dark. Dark was about ten after six.
At the rate we were going, we’d have four cords done by then. If nothing broke, and neither one of us quit.
Four cords wasn’t anywhere close to my winter.
And I thought, I’ll pay forty dollars again next Saturday if I have to.
But there are three old women down this road who’ve been looking out their windows ever since the leaves turned. And not one of them has called me.
Because how do you call a brand-new widow and ask her where your free firewood is?
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.