My Paleo Day

Sometimes good things just happen.
About the Paleo thing- I had not needed to go to the gym lately. I’ve been riding, walking a lot, and lifting and hauling lots of firewood and logs the past month. My woodshed roof collapsed a couple of months ago so I had to extract and restack two cords of wood. Lifting, hauling, pushing and carrying is part of a Paleo exercise program.

A few months ago Central Maine Power noticed some wild cherry trees that were threatening their overhead power lines on the property line between my neighbor Bill and I, so they cut them down, and Bill told me to take them for firewood.

I saved out a 6 foot log for my friend Dave, who will carve a paddle for his new cedar and canvas canoe out of it. The rest I cut into stove-length pieces that I hauled up and stacked for processing. Some of the pieces were almost 2 feet in diameter.

Three weeks’ free heat

So, I got out the splitting maul and started at it yesterday, lifting and rolling and whacking away. At one point, Bill drove by on his John Deere Gator and asked me if I wanted to borrow his wood splitter. Both my shoulders have been acting up recently, so I said yes.
Less than 5 minutes later, he was up with the Gator again, with the Supersplit in tow.
In less than an hour, I had split up all that wood, and kept at it, filling up a half-dozen plastic buckets with dry kindling.

You still get to lift and throw

Bill came back again, this time dropping off more local harvest: a rump steak and a pound of venison sausage, and a pound of garlic heads that I’ll plant in the garden for next year’s crop. He shot the deer in the field below our houses and reasoned that it was probably fed from my own vegetable garden.

Tomorrow I’ll continue this ancient exchange by dropping off a few bars from my latest batch of pemmican.