The Season of Thankfulness

Welcome to Ironwood Hollow

We all have family stories that warm our hearts, that remind us of the very best part of our heritage. Here's one of mine. It's short, but I still can't tell it without choking up. My grandfather Arnold died suddenly of a heart attack when I was a young boy. He was a formal, intimidating man to us kids, and unfortunately we never got to know him better than that. Shortly after retiring, he and my Grammy Carrie had almost all of the family, kids, cousins, etc., to their beautiful cottage on the coast of Maine, and that's when he went. It was sudden, and the family has never gotten together again as completely as we did for his funeral that weekend. Her name was the last word he spoke.

A few years ago my mother told me that Grammy Carrie, who outlived him by many years, kept his bedroom slippers under the bed until her own passing. She never loved another. That kind of devotion makes my heart swell with hope for humankind. I just can't think of another way to say it. 

Grammie's memory lives, and not just in the Fiestaware!

One of the ways Grammie Carrie lives on in our family is in our dishware, as odd as that sounds; I remember sitting at her old kitchen table when I visited them as a boy, having breakfast cereal in an original green fiesta bowl. She loved her collection of fiestaware. To this day I can't hold a green piece of fiesta without thinking of her, and a varied assortment of fiesta is what we use for everyday dishware, as well as for special occasions. That table, where Grampy used to keep his feet under the support bar so as to catch any of us kids, or our parents when they were little, who might used it as a footrest (against the rules), was laden with a feast on fiestaware for this Thanksgiving. This year our newly grown family sat around that same table, held hands, said grace, and carried the memory of my Grampy and Grammy forward into a heartwarming, wonderful, new time of our lives.

The connection that struck me in that moment is that I finally understand the devotion that she had for him. Meeting my Honey's eyes at the far end of this table, with our newly blended family connecting us along the length of the big room,  I realized that although times change, love is powerful and enduring. May we all find that one perfect other, the one whose slippers could never be taken out from under the bed. May our children and grandchildren learn from us that such a thing is possible.

Update from Ironwood Hollow

It has been a good week here at Ironwood Hollow. The Vanilla Tupelo Honey Mead started a week ago has been bubbling away quietly in the pantry. We've talked with a couple of mead-students who are now accomplished meaders in their own right about some batches in progress and how to handle unforeseen issues (when in doubt, wait for it to get better). We've moved some things around so as to get to the mead in the cellar a little more easily, with an eye to finding just the right bottles for what promises to be an epic Thanksgiving. 

We've had the first snow of any consequence since Honey and the kids have moved in, and we all watched a young buck browsing our blackberry bushes amidst the new white this morning before school. Everyone pitched in with the project of building a rack above our firewood in the woodshed, for all the reclaimed lumber that has been accumulating for future projects. 

The Mellow Hill Dome

The kids have taken to country life in a beautiful way, and we're just getting started. The boys have done nearly all the work of sifting gravel for the driveway repairs and a greywater drainage area for wash-water. All of them help with the firewood. This morning we watched that buck nibbling in the yard before the kids made their own tracks right across his on their way to the school-bus pickup.

We have started to arrange our thanksgiving, first one together. I realized this morning that I will just be a puddle of emotion for that entire day, as Honey's family meets mine, we fill the 'Hollow with more love and kin than ever before, and these cordwood walls (and our arms) embrace the newly grown family that we are bringing together. Tears of joy make the best seasoning, and since I know what a big old heap of sentimentality I am, I think I'll let Honey do the talking while I carve the turkeys. 

We just got our first delivery from Currier and Chives, a new local bakery CSA, and had home-made raisin bread toast for breakfast today! If there is a local farmer who sells any kind of shares in his product, that is such a great way to support the real local green economy. Ask at health-food stores and farmer's markets if there is anything like that around you; we have seafood, meat, vegetable, and bakery CSA's in our area, and support them as we can.

We're looking forward to a big building project next year, and have started pulling ideas together for that. Winter in Maine is long, and cozy evenings by the fire with graph paper and alternative building books will get us through. Watch for updates!

Filling Dad's woodshed.

About the kids and wood...my Dad, right next door in the Mellow Hill Dome, needed help this year with his firewood for the first time ever. He had it all cut ahead and seasoned in the old shed down by the barn, but needed to have three cords of wood moved up to the shed next to the house and workshop. In two easy afternoons the kids pitched in, and we scurried back and forth like an ant colony with wheelbarrows, until he had everything just the way he needs it for the winter. I was so proud of them...I haven't smiled that much through hard work in my whole life. 

So that's life at Ironwood Hollow this week. Family, wildlife, projects, hopes, dreams, blessings, trials, love, life, beauty, and yet more blessings. May your life be as full, and may you be as aware of that fullness as we are!

Coppice Thoughts

I have been mulling over a particular aspect of tree lore for the last few days, trying to find the best way to express it, to find its real place in my world-view. In the middle of this process, we've had a family health crisis that brought my thoughts into focus very quickly. I've always thought of trees and forests as a fine source of meaningful symbolism and metaphor, and today I can't think of a better way to say what I feel.

The roots of a coppiced tree feed the new shoots.

Coppicing is the practice of cutting a tree once, then waiting for numerous shoots to grow from the stump as new trees for various purposes. Trees that are harvested in this way include hazel, oak, willow, and one of my favorites, ironwood. What happens is the root system, unharmed by the cutting, feeds the living tissue in the outer rings and bark of the stump, and new trees grow in a ring from the already-established roots. Eventually the stump disappears under the new growth and becomes just a memory, but the old roots, and the new shoots, live on. 

Some of the shoots thrive, and some don't, but they all get a good start from that parental tree, nourished because of all the years it put in, reaching deep into the soil, finding nutrients, water, strength. I can still remember the day, probably twenty-five years ago, when my father, on one of our many fire-wood cutting days, explained this to me, pointing out a ring of maples, growing closely together, all the same size. He taught me that you can tell the size of the original tree by imagining a circle drawn by the centers of all of the new trees.

Men teach boys a lot by saying little, in my experience, and I'm not claiming that's all for the good. But it's true, and this is a good example. I have no doubt that Dad felt the symbolic weight of coppicing, that image of an adult tree passing on its strength to the new generation, of the shape of the parent tree echoing through the years in the pattern of new growth. He didn't say any of that, though. He just pointed out the plain facts, looking me in the eye, while I, a boy learning to be a man, listened carefully for levels of meaning. 

Coppiced trees show the size of the parent stump.

The depth of the understanding clicks into place later, as life provides more events, more experience, more joys, trials, beauties, loves. Seeing the way that my life, my sister's life, our children's lives, all echo his presence in many ways, no matter how far we may travel, and despite many other influences, I am rocked by the depth of meaning in so much of what he has given us. The tree lore is one thing, the unabashed love for the world around us is another, the wish to appreciate nature in quiet reflection. The humor and affection that he has always spread freely is still more of it. 


When you see a close ring of trees, take a moment to think about the gifts that carry through generations like the shape of that coppice. When you look at your parents, your siblings, your children, imagine them as a coppice, and appreciate the ways that we have been gifted by our elders. Think how we can gift our young with the strength of our roots too.

Last Child in the Woods? Not Yet.

When I was about ten years old, my family moved from a small suburban home to a couple of dozen acres of freshly harvested pine forest. The land was littered with branches and huge stumps, with smaller trees leaning in to fill the empty spaces overhead left by the fallen pine giants.Even so,  I found those woods to be magical, and we were surrounded by plenty of undeveloped woods. Until then, my idea of "forest" had been an acre or so of woods tucked between our neighborhood and the nearest main road. The reality of a couple of square miles of trees, trails and streams was amazing.

I just love trees!

I learned to go deep into the woods, far enough to hear nothing but birds and rustling critters. When I wrapped my arms around the larger trees, I could feel the earth and wind through them. The rough bark on my cheek, the constant whispering of the leaves, the ankle-deep moss, soaked into me, made me a country boy in no time. Inspired by Robert Frost's poem "Birches," I climbed leggy trees until they bent to let me down. I felt that call to climb into the heights of the branches, and beyond, but also the pull of the earth below, so eloquently described by Mr. Frost nearly a hundred years ago. As he wrote, earth's the right place for love, but also, one could do worse than be a swinger of birches. 

Beeches in winter

Inspired by the Tarzan novels, I made pathways among the trees, lashing cedar logs between the upper trunks with nylon baling twine. I would run along these balance-beams, hanging onto branches, from one tree to the next, and the next, and never fell. I know that my father, who grew up with a forest too, not far away, knew the importance of giving his children such an opportunity. Those seasons among the trees impressed me deeply. Years later, when I was at last able to build my own home on that same acreage, using some of the trees that I had known as a boy, it felt like I had never left.

Among the hemlocks that I cut, peeled, and dragged out for floor framing was one that had grown around some knotted nylon baling twine about twenty feet off the ground. When I discovered it, I realized it was the only remaining trace of those treetop trails I had built. Those days of playing Tarzan came back to me in a rush, and I gave that particular log a place of honor in the house. I know exactly where it is under the floor-boards now. I think of how I've come back to a new beginning, and how a new generation is now held up by that log as they follow their own youthful, dreaming paths into the world by way of these acres of woods.

Think how those logs beneath our floor, cut from trees that I grew up climbing, are the foundation for the same kind of magic happening all over again. We're giving our kids the great gift of learning the smell of spring leaves, the feel of a tree beneath you swaying in the wind, the music of crisp leaves underfoot, and the crack of freezing bark in the middle of the coldest winter's nights. If I can borrow a phrase from a really important book, "The Last Child in the Woods" is still out there, and I would say that there are many of them, since I know of so many who are raising nature-aware kids. Not everyone can leave the cities and suburbs, but I am so glad that our kids have this chance, and encourage anyone to find ways to get their children out under some trees as often as they can.