“Observations from the Woodpile”
Jeff Yocum
Prologue
Observations from the Woodpile” is a collection of essays bundled together and given as a birthday present for my wife, Nancy, in 1997. Twenty-seven years have passed since the collection was given. The two main subjects of the essays, my sons Justus and Jacob, have grown into men with families of their own.
Snake!
By the spring of 1996, the truckload of logs had been mastered and tamed into a neat stack of five cords of wood—8 feet by 4 feet by 20 feet. The woodlot was dry enough to get the tractor in without getting buried, and enough wood had been used from the woodshed to make space for the new wood. A Saturday in late April was set aside for everyone in the family to help move the wood to the woodshed. It wouldn’t take long if everyone pitched in. More opportunity for that ever-so-special quality time my kids loved so much.
We threw as much wood onto the wagon as would stay without being shaken off. Two stood on the wagon and stacked it as three worked from the ground and lifted the wood up to the wagon. Row after row, the wood made the trip to the shed, and the stack of wood in the woodlot grew smaller.
About the fourth row into the stack, my heart was tested when my daughter shrieked, “Snake!”
We all looked to see if we could find it. Of course, the snake had crawled deeper into the stack. My daughter crawled onto the wagon, kicking her little brother off to work on the ground. For a while, we maintained the “two on the wagon and three on the ground” work configuration. However, as we worked deeper into the stack, more of our shoulderless friends exposed themselves. By the last stack, we had seen at least five different snakes, and we had seen them more than once. By then, the work party configuration shifted to “four on the wagon and one (me) on the ground.”
The snakes stubbornly held to the sanctuary of the wood stack. They did not abandon the stack until the last sticks were thrown onto the wagon. Since it was relatively cool, they were fairly sluggish and easy to catch. I’m not particularly fond of handling snakes, and I limit myself to harmless varieties. I’m not crazy about the idea of killing them indiscriminately either, so I took them all to a remote part of the property for release. Personally, I’d rather have snakes than mice.
We could have run and abandoned the wood to the snakes, and they would have bred, making it even more of a difficult task to get the wood to the shed. However, I wasn’t about to turn over a winter’s worth of work to a bunch of snakes. It was a question of how badly I wanted that stack of wood.
I have seen the value in my own life of thinking about problems such as those snakes in the woodpile. The snakes wouldn’t go away until we had gone through the entire stack, and most other problems tend to be just as persistent. Unresolved problems tend to breed as well. It’s a matter of resolve in who will win out—you or the problem.
I’ve seen this principle at work, with the kids, in my marriage, just about anywhere you can think of that a problem can occur. Problems don’t go away until they are completely exposed and have nowhere else to hide.
That workday has firmly established itself in the minds of the kids. I’m certain it’s destined for legendary status in the annuls of family lore. I’ve used that incident several times on the kids as an example of how problems can be just as persistent as those snakes. It’s a matter of who wants it more ̶ them or the snakes.
