TITLE: Lay a Split of Good Oak on the Andirons
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 03, 2018  7:24 AM
DESC: 
-----
BODY:
<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm.  One is
 the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocer,
 and the other that heat comes from the furnace.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 The remedy for the first, according to Aldo Leopold, is to grow
 a garden, preferably in a place without the temptation and
 distraction of a grocery store.  The remedy for the second is
 to "lay a split of good oak on the andirons" and let it warm
 your body "while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside".

 I ran across Leopold's <EM>The Sand County Almanac</EM> in the
 local nature center late this summer.  After thumbing through
 the pages during a break in a day-long meeting indoors, I added
 it to my long list of books to read.  My reading list is actually
 stack, so there was some hope that I might get to it soon -- and
 some danger that it would be buried before I did.

 Then an old high school friend, propagating a meme on Facebook,
 posted a picture of the book and wrote that it had changed his
 life, changed how he looked at the world.  That caught my
 attention, so I anchored it atop my stack and checked a copy
 out of the university library.

 It now serves as a quiet read for this city boy on a dark and
 rainy three-day weekend.  There are no February blizzards here
 yet, of course, but autumn storms have lingered for days.  In
 an important sense, I'm not a "city boy", as my by big-city
 friends will tell me, but I've lived my life mostly sheltered
 from the reality growing my own food and heating my home by a
 wonderful and complex economy of specialized labor that
 benefits us all.  It's good to be reminded sometimes of that
 good fortune, and also to luxuriate in the idea of experiencing
 a different kind of life, even if only for a while.
-----