I wouldn’t want to be the one to reinforce stereotypes, but then, the guy who sold us half a cord of wood this weekend was exactly what you’re supposed to expect from someone from West Virginia. He was this good ol’ boy named Lon, or Lee, or something, and his sophisticated, market-researched way of determining if’n we all needed wood was to come to the door, tap a couple of times, and then ask: Y’all want some wood?
W’all did. Or Krissy did, which amounts to the same thing. We have a wood-burning stove in the front room, which I cleaned about five inches of ash out of last weekend; it’s as if the previous owners of the house burned all the incriminating documents before they left. Having cleared the way for additional incinerations, Krissy didn’t want to waste a moment. She may be the only pregnant woman in the world who is cold all the time; she was planning to curl up to the stove’s blistering hot metal surface and sigh contentedly.
What became immediately apparent is that neither Krissy or I had any concept of what how much wood was in a “cord”; it’s one of those units of measurement, like “hoghead” or “fathom,” that doesn’t have much use in today’s zippy, high-tech world. It is, in fact, 128 cubic feet (I looked it up just now). We got a good approximation by watching Lon/Lee/Whomever pile a cord of wood on our neighbor’s driveway. He ended up with a pile nearly large enough to build a log cabin, with an addition for the inlaws. We decided we didn’t need anywhere near that much. The in-laws aren’t visiting any time soon. So we got half a cord.
Our pile didn’t look any smaller than our neighbors, which led me to believe that the Wood Guy had no idea what a cord really was, either; he just kept piling it out until he felt he had piled sufficiently. And because he was good, decent folk, he’d rather err on the side of generosity. Hell, they got tons of trees out there in West Virginia, just waiting for the choppin’. We paid the man, he thanked us very courteously and then headed off, leaving us with a waist-high pile of wood in our driveway.
About half the wood we managed to arrange on our porch, within easy access for the cold winter ahead, but then we ran out of space. I had to borrow the neighbors’ wheelbarrow and take the rest round back to the workshop. It was a big wheelbarrow, but it still took ten trips. By the time I was done, my forearms looked like Popeye’s, minus the anchor tattoo. All those trips served to remind me why I had gone to college; it was to avoid doing work exactly like this. Well, guess I screwed up again.