On Saturday I drove out to Innisfree where a friend had purchased some land next to a lake. It was totally undeveloped, but he and his wife went out regularly in their camper to spend time there. They have an eventual goal of putting up a cabin.
The place is filled with “No Trespassing” signs, and I guess you could say it is a gated community. But that is all due to the gas well there. It does allow a nice place to park.
From there you go into the woods, where they have been working to make a clearing amongst all the poplar trees. So I was put to work chopping down trees, cutting up branches, and piling up wood. The wife did the burning, but she got a little zealous at it and put too much wood in the fire pit. The coals burned all day, and probably still are.
I didn’t head out as early as I could have. It wasn’t the best weather in the city, but it was nice out there. A little cloudy, but an acceptable temperature. Once you got working, it was perfect.
It was nice to do some physical labor. It’s a change from using your brain at your job. And you get to see immediate results from the work. And I only once hit my leg with the machete. Thankfully, I never did with the chainsaw.
The wife gave us a goal of getting to a certain fallen tree. That helped me a lot. My sister describes me as goal oriented, and I’ve come to accept that. So I focused on that, and we got there. Unfortunately the chainsaw ran out of gas while we were cutting it up, but I still think of the mission as accomplished.
The clearing is now bigger.
We had a dinner cooked on the firepit, and then sat around the coals until it started raining. (Hopefully that will put them out.) By then it was pitch black and we had to use the flashlights to get out. As always happens in those situations, you don’t realize how much smoke you’ve breathed until later.
I drove back to town that night.