Conversation

The evening air was cold but in a refreshing sort of way. The kind of cold that requires a flannel coat and big hat, but not the stinging, cheek nipping kind. We worked by the light of single bulb hanging from the lean-to shed. A little breeze now and then rocks the bulb and makes our shadows even more active than we are. Gloved up in leather, we unload wood a stick or two at a time.

My good friend Don Smith has brought a load or two of stove wood to the Chicken Ranch every season for years. I burn it in my wood stove in the shop. Mostly oak with some yellow poplar mixed in, the fire from that wood makes for comfortable working on a snow spitting winter day. So we offload the annual winter supply and talk. Talking as men talk while they accomplish a task together.

We each throw in snippets of info about the health and welfare of our families. We speak of our own aging discomforts and grouse about not being able to do all that we did at 30. But then one of us mentions the recent ill health, or death, of a friend and we give thanks (including the Good Lord in our conversation) that we’re still “vertical and ventilatin“. We talk politics, the current state of the world we live in, how it’s getting worse and ain’t likely to improve. How it makes us fear for our grandkids. Then to lighten things up, we tell political a joke or two. We talk ranching and cattle, the price of fuel, and then the wood is stacked and the truck bed empty.

We shake hands and ask each other to exchange “greetins to the family”. Don fires up the diesel in his white Ford and pulls away. I give him a quick wave as his headlights point up the road .It’s then that I realize that I’ve altogether forgotten the cold. I’m warm inside.

As I turn off the shed light and head up to the house, I think the work took the edge off the cold, sure. But spending time workin with a close friend on a crisp autumn evening, with the smell of a woodpile in your nose and the canopy of glittering stars overhead. Talkin about things that matter to ya. Well, if that can’t warm a body up inside... I reckon nothing will.