NOVEMBER 25, 2022 – Blogger’s note: some of my readers have already noticed “word-count creep” in my posts. For two years, the self-imposed daily word limit was 500. In my travelogue series earlier this year, I broke that rule fairly often. Lately, I’ve unofficially bumped the limit up by 10%–and occasionally more. Today’s post, which in the past would’ve been broken into a three-part series, I’ve thrown limits to the wind, but I think the story reads better when presented seamlessly.
Many of us have said, “Things happen for a reason.” Most of us have experienced the correlative maxim, “When things don’t go according to plan, often the result’s better than planned.”
Because I’m immunocompromised, Beth and I couldn’t mingle with people inside on Thanksgiving. Moreover, even outside, I’m not supposed to be among more than two, three people. Accordingly, we invited our son Cory and Blake and our granddaughter Illiana over for cider and snacks by a bonfire on our back patio. A bonfire, of course, involves fire, which requires wood. Since I was at the lake when the plan was hatched, returning two days before Thanksgiving, I’d planned to bring back a supply of fuel for the bonfire.
Except . . . while at the Red Cabin, I’d been so fixated on providing our other son, Byron, and his wife, Mylène, with an ample store of firewood for their stay up there in early January, I’d forgotten to stash logs in the trunk of my car for the patio bonfire back home.
I remembered—two hours from the Red Cabin. For the rest of the trip, I fixated on the irony of having to buy firewood at the local Speedway C-store. I tried to mollify myself by rationalizing that the $8.00-bundle of Speedway poplar would be less than the added fuel cost of a car loaded with a trunkful of oak. With gas now at $3.42 a gallon and a vehicle that averages 35 mpg, I didn’t have to run the numbers to know my rationalization was mathematically baseless.
So I tried another rationalization: my car was so loaded with the gnome home supplies that I ferry back and forth between city home and Red Cabin, there wouldn’t have been space for firewood. Nice try: I knew plenty of firewood could’ve been stuffed into the trunk somehow.
After dispensing with rationalizations, I focused on remedies. A plan came into view as I coasted down the big hill out of Wisconsin to Taylors Falls on the Minnesota side of the St. Croix. On Wednesday I’d hike down alleys in the neighborhood and look for firewood. I’d “borrow,” not steal, and upon my next return from the Red Cabin, I’d repay the “loan” with ample “interest.”
When I arrived home, however, a better plan surfaced. Beth told me that neighbors Dave and Kate, diagonally across the alley from us, had recently offered us “all the firewood we wanted” from their sizable inventory. Perfect . . . until I sauntered over to their house and found it dark. The house remained abandoned Wednesday. I worried that they’d left town for Thanksgiving, perhaps all the way to California, given that Dave’s parents live there.
On my return to our driveway, however, I noticed in the dim illumination of the alley light a small woodpile in the corner of the yard of Dave and Kate’s next door neighbors—who are directly across the alley from us. This second set of neighbors had inherited the wood when they’d bought the house 18 months ago, and the pile looked long untouched. The woman of the house, Stephanie, was walking from their garage to their house, so I called out to ask if I could have a few pieces of wood for our planned Thanksgiving bonfire.
“Sure,” she said, glancing at the woodpile as if seeing it for the first time.
“Thanks much,” I said. “I’ll pick some out tomorrow in the daylight.”
If Stephanie is laconic, her husband is mostly silent. They’re a relatively young couple, with origins in Texas and are industrious, prosperous, and spend the majority of their free time, it appears, on improving their home. When they moved in, I had no trouble understanding and remembering Stephanie’s name. Her husband, on the other hand, uttered a name I didn’t catch the first time, the second or the third. I wasn’t about to ask a fourth time.
This bothered me. I like knowing people’s names, especially in the case of neighbors. Ways exist, of course, to look up people, but neither Beth nor I had ever gotten around to it. The best method would be to ask their next door neighbors—Dave and Kate, but it’s hard to catch them, and when we do, we always wind up talking about other things.
Forward to Thanksgiving. When it was time to build the bonfire, I’d made no progress collecting firewood. I had plenty of kindling—dead twigs, which I’d been collecting for months—but I hadn’t yet pulled any wood from Stephanie and ____________’s forlorn stack. I walked across the alley to fetch some, just as Stephanie and ___________’s yap dog was on potty break under the watch of ____________, who, equipped with a plastic bag over his hand, was ready for clean-up operations.
The yapper yapped at me, and in a friendly tone, I said, “Oh, little fella, I think you’re mostly bark and very little bite.” Of course, this was intended for _____________, as well as the dog, to signal that I was a “friendly.” I then said to ______________, “I’m going to borrow a couple of sticks of firewood, if that’s all right. I’d spoken to Stephanie about it.”
______________ murmured something about “going inside.” I inferred that he meant, perhaps, that he had real firewood stored in their garage, even their house, and was offering some. I took this as a sign of neighborly accommodation with a better outcome than the rotting wood from the yard. “I’ll have to stay outside, though,” I said, “since I’m immune-compromised.”
Again, ______________ said something about “going inside,” adding that he was “just cleaning up.”
I then put one and two together: he wasn’t going inside to get firewood; he was simply assuring me that if the barking bothered me (it didn’t), he’d soon be taking the dog inside. Since my standing there a second longer would’ve been awkward—given zero prospect for conversation—I returned to our house.
Now I was desperate. Under no circumstances could I bring myself to drive to Speedway and buy a bundle of firewood, when at the lake, we have a 10,000-year supply free for the taking (after sawing and splitting). Nevertheless, I had to come up with fuel for the Thanksgiving bonfire.
“What to do?” as my grandpa Holman would say to preface a long tale about how he’d solved some imponderable problem that he’d just outlined for you, as you suppressed a yawn. Desperate circumstances require desperate measures. In the case of a scrap wood hoarder (I won’t mention any names), desperation means robbing his garage of “beautiful” stubs (of varying lengths) of “perfect” 2 x 4s (let alone stub 2 x 6s). I had my fuel source—but at a price, for there’s nothing worse than wasting perfectly good scraps of lumber by . . . burning them.
Yet, as every Scout knows, you need more than kindling (my twigs) and firewood (scrap 2 x 4/6s) to build a patio bonfire. You need matches and . . . lighter fluid, or, lacking that, and refusing to emulate one of your bros-in-law and using gasoline, you have to resort to the age-old element of crumpled paper.
We no longer subscribe to newspapers, however, so I was forced to rummage through our paper-recycling bin. Actually, no rummaging was required. All that occupied the bin were a few pieces of unopened junk mail. I pulled them out, tore open the envelopes, yanked out the contents and crumpled up every stitch of paper. In the hands of an Outward Bound alumnus (albeit a thousand years ago), there was enough to start the fire—without lawnmower gas.
After dumping all the paper into the portable firepit, I noticed a small envelope that had slipped from somewhere and landed behind a planter next to the back doorway; for recycling, no doubt, now to be added to the firepit.
I picked up the envelope and flipped it over. The neat handwriting across the face read, “Beth – Money for alley light. Thanks for taking care of this. Stephanie & [. . .]
“[. . .]
“[. . .] Eliud.” ELIUD. At last, the neighbor’s name revealed.
But the story gets better, if longer. When I stepped back out to the firepit, I peeked around the corner and saw a car in Dave and Kate’s driveway. More cars were parked on the street in front of their house. They were home after all, hosting the Big Feast. I strode directly to their back door and rang the doorbell. I knew I might be interrupting a fine meal, but in their garage, I surmised, was the fuel for a fine bonfire.
Both Dave and Kate answered. Thankfully, I kept my wits and greeted our fine neighbors with a “Happy Thanksgiving!” before going straight for the wishbone.
“Of course!” they answered in unison. “Here, I’ll pull some from the garage,” said Dave. “How much do you need?”
“About an hour’s worth in the firepit,” I said. Dave walked to the back of his garage, pulled a bundle off a stack and carried it out to me. I couldn’t believe my eyes—it was one of those $8 packs from Speedway.
“Will this do?”
“That’s plenty.”
“Let me know if you need more,” he said.
“You’re a godsend, Dave,” I said. “Thanks a million, and again, Happy Thanksgiving!”
“Sure, sure,” he said. “Happy Thanksgiving to you too!”
“I’ll replenish the wood after my next trip to the cabin,” I said.
I was thankful for my good fortune. In short order I had the fire going. Cory’s family arrived soon thereafter, and for the next hour, we enjoyed the best Thanksgiving get-togethers I could’ve imagined—warmed by friendly flames licking nice, dry firewood.
And for extra credit, I’d learned the name . . . Eliud.
(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)
© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
