Keeping Warm

If I could draw any direct line between Jimmy Carter and me, it was his alleged impact on my afternoon chores.

As the price of oil rose, so did the number of wood stoves in our house. To feed them, we had a massive, continually expanding wood pile. It did not fill me with joy to see its peak outperforming the chicken coop in height. After a storm, or during the height of Dutch elm disease, the pile dwarfed the garage.

Our big, old farmhouse had a furnace, but my father kept the thermostat at 60 degrees. The wood pile did fill him with a measure of security and, yes, great joy. My father loved nothing more than shared labor, close to home.

They claim firewood heats you three times. This truism would have never occurred to us. My father had cut the trees and split the logs, and we were obligated to do the rest.

My siblings and I spent untold hours traversing the frozen, rutty path, toting precarious loads on inventive conveyances. As our task seemed so endless, and often in frigid temperatures, we tried to come up with the fastest way to finish before we died: wheelbarrows, hand trucks, sometimes the sled. Not aware of the irony, we’d sometimes embark on a fireman’s relay, one transferred-armload at a time, from the pile to the porch.

The little bit of snow gets blown by the gale, giving the physical force a visual definition; snow makes the icy wind white. In the porch light, eddies are shown by their glitter. Down near window wells, near protected corners of your house, you can see sparrows already looking for seeds. The wind finds them, even here and pushes their downy bodies, along with the dry leaves and pine needles. The gusts build as the dawn does. To the east, over the ocean, scattered clouds turn gray, then lavender.

A warm week is followed by a cold one, but so far this trend has not managed to kill off the aphids. On the warm days, colonies turn the plant tips fuzzy gray. The minuscule bodies, in an ascending cluster, drink from their host’s hearty, undying frame. It is gross but impressive. They have woven themselves especially tight, as if for heat retention; their hairy, dusty-looking bodies overlap.

Insect pests are the main reason farmers are encouraged to destroy crop residues. In lieu of freezing temperatures, a disc harrow would kill the cold-hardy crop, and thus the parasite. However, also in lieu of freezing temperatures, is the farmer, forever the opportunist, wanting to extend harvest. To take full advantage of the cabbage that still grows and the broccoli that sends so many side shoots, some plants yielding something since October — why not?

The aphids have pretty much come to the same conclusion.