Animal lovers read at your own risk:
The three F’s:
Firewood
Firearms
Firemen
All these very ominous words suspiciously start with the same letter as that
perniciously troublesome word: “Father”.
Is this chance? I think not.
Last Saturday afternoon Chloe and I decided to spend
the day at the local bookstore while the boys headed for the barn to cut
and stack wood. And that right there is where this little narrative goes wrong. Right from the start, which is to say that Chloe and I leaving the boys on
their own was our first mistake. Male
brains make way better decisions when estrogen is nearby and unfortunately on
this Saturday, it wasn’t.
First, the firewood: We needed some. But the getting is not as labor intensive as you would imagine. In the modern age, cutting and stacking wood
is not what it used to be. Mark uses his
chainsaw while the boys man the gas-powered wood splitter. Barely an ounce of sweat is produced by these
activities. Stacking the wood is another
matter but we still don’t feel sorry for them.
Especially since I helped split and stack the incident-free weekend before.
Out behind are barn is plenty of wood, it just needs to be cut up. There were a dozen large timber trees that Mark had gotten
off a property that had just been thinned.
Mark would cut sections off the tree into rounds, roll them to Mitchell
who’d split them, and toss them into a pile for Connor to stack. How wrong can that go?
Wrong enough.
At some point during Mark’s chain sawing, he cut through the
tree and it looked as if it were starting to bleed. He stopped the chainsaw, wondered if he’d cut
himself and inspected his hands and legs. Nothing
wrong there. He returned to cutting and
more blood gushed from the tree. Once
the tree was sliced through he discovered a squirrel --or more accurately, two halves of a
once whole squirrel, who made the unfortunate decision to take a cozy winter nap inside the tree right
smack in the center of his cutting line.
The boys decided the best plan of action would be to cremate the poor
squirrel by piling up all the excess bark into a big mound, setting it on fire,
and tossing in the upper and lower regions of their fallen comrade along with a jumble of associated guts.
The bark pile was set ablaze with a brazen amount of gas, sprinkled with squirrel parts, lit with a match, and then they went back to work.
Soon more cutting and splitting ensued and once more another
tree began to bleed. Apparently our tree
was a squirrel duplex and another cruel eviction had been served. This time when the tree split in half they
found its occupant miraculously alive yet horrifically mutilated beyond
repair. Now what?
Well according to testosterone this is where the second “F”
comes in: Firearms.
Mark went and got the gun. Had estrogen been on the scene, any gaggle of girls would have been
running away from the grisly scene to seek refuge in the house leaving the poor squirrel to meet its maker unassisted. This is not the way of testosterone. In sharp contrast, the boys were posturing as to who among them would be the best henchman to put the thing out of its misery.
Somehow Connor prevailed. In some
bizarre male bonding experiment a proud father loaded the gun and unleashed the
weapon into his son’s hands. Soon the
deed was done. Squirrel dead, young boy hopped up on adrenaline.
One more for the crematorium, which was fully ablaze by this
time.
With that, they set off back to work once more cutting and
stacking. They weren’t at it long when a
few visitors showed up at the barn. These
visitors brought with them an enormous fire truck. Yes, the third F: Firemen.
Mark looked up at the fully clad crew, put down his chain
saw and said, “Let me guess…today is NOT a burn day.”
They smiled and nodded.
Mark has never been known for his fact-checking. He had simply surveyed the valley surrounding
our house, spotted several smoke plumes, and assumed it was a burn day. Unfortunately it was only a burn day for the government. So when the local fire department saw the
smoke they jumped in their biggest firetruck and came to check things out (my theory is that perhaps they got a tip from an irritated neighbor who had had it with the copious amounts of chain-sawing, gun-firing, and fire making going on next door). But soon they admitted they weren't really concerned about the now identified fire and that they were simply
bored and this gave them something to do.
Meanwhile Connor got a little nervous as this was his first brush with the law (that we know about anyway) and was hoping the firefighters wouldn’t notice the dead
carcasses in the fire--or the gun. He was relieved when they finally left and he "wasn't arrested".
At the end of the day when Chloe and I returned nothing
about their firewood shenanigans was ever mentioned.
But late that night, right before bed, we always ask our kids what their favorite
part of the day was. Connor couldn't contain his excitement over the days events any longer and bluntly stated,
“I got to shoot an animal and the fire department showed up.”
And there you have it. Quite a contrast to girls day at the bookstore. When a Father's in charge anything can happen, and around here it usually does.
