The man who milled my logs into lumber called me two weeks ago to come pick it up. I don't have a truck and I'm on tour half the time, so it took me a while to get a round tuit. Finally, today, I got the borrowed truck and the sawyer aligned. Looked like rain. What are ya gonna do?

Me, I'm gonna seed my back lawn before it rains. So, I raked, fertilized, and seeded while Mary went to yoga. Then I had to take back my rental car and we went to pick up the truck. It was noon when we got to the sawyer's. Looked like rain all morning. Drizzled on us a little as we drove over.

The wood is beautiful. He's good. Much of it is quarter-sawn, a technique that brings out the grain and creates more stable wood. It's also extremely heavy, the price you pay for oak. We figured maybe three loads, not because it wouldn't fit, but because the truck literally couldn't carry the weight.

Sawyer jokes about my short bed truck, says I better not pull out too fast. "You'll load it again!" He laughs. I tell him I'll be careful. He breaks the bands and we hand-load the wood, rather than trying to put a whole banded pile in the back of the truck.

We make it home without incident. I need to saw the "sticks" down to size. Those are the waste pieces that we use to stack the lumber with, so that each piece gets air around it. Mary starts moving rocks out of the way. It starts raining and I'm sawing sticks with a skilsaw, just far enough under the roof of the garage that I have to lean into the dripline every time I cut a piece. I get quite efficiently soaked.

Mulch has to be moved. We slowly make a nice place for our monster pile of gorgeous oak to live for a year. It's raining. Mary and I start stacking wood, but it's obvious how pregnant she is and I tell her to go inside and do something else. I can do it faster by myself and I'm already as wet as fresh laundry.

I get done stacking the load that we brought and I tell Mary to stay home. "I'll get the rest." She makes me sit down for soup and quesadillas. Our kid is gonna love it here. Mary can invent a great snack in minutes.

I go back for another load of wood. It's nearly 5pm. Still raining. I've already decided that I'm going to try to get all of it. Nobody's at the lumber yard, so I load it myself for a while. The old sawyer comes out, breaks the bands on the last pile, and helps me load it. The pieces on the last pile are shorter than the rest. The back of the truck is looking mighty low. He shows me some other wood that I might use to build a bookshelf in the office. I'm looking for wide pieces, I say. He says, "It don't matter if people are building a chicken coop, they always want wide boards."

About halfway home, I realize that I've stacked the short boards on top of the long boards. That sucks, because I want to put the longest boards down first, and get to shorter pieces as the stack grows, so everything is fully supported and the whole pile has a low center of gravity. Easily several tons of oak.

I'm thinking about how I'm going to do this. I'm going to have to stack the short pieces off to the side, get down to the long pieces, stack those on the pile, and then stack the short pieces from their temporary stack to their final place on top of the big pile. In the rain. Is there a better way to do it?

Turns out, there is. I am sitting at the stoplight at Merritt's store, in the left hand turn lane on the bridge, waiting to turn onto highway 54, thinking about all of this when the light turns green. I pull forward and it sounds like a few boards come loose and fall off the back of the truck. I stop and turn around to see what's happened.

The whole pile of wood is sitting on the road. It is still stacked just as it was in the bed of the truck. Perfectly. There's not even a board out of place. The short ones are sitting right there on top. The long ones are on the bottom.

It's 5:30pm on a Monday, in the middle of one of the main arteries into and out of the hospital and UNC campus. It's raining. Everyone coming my way wants to make a left turn onto the highway and go home. There is an enormous pile of oak planks in the way.

Several women jump out of their cars to help. One was in heels. I gave her the gloves. "Thank you so much for stopping to help! Short pieces first, please." So, with divine intervention and several volunteers,  I got the wood quickly flipped into the right order. A couple of guys showed up to offer a bungee, as if that was going to stop a ton and a half of wood from going anywhere.

The situation now in hand, I chugged very slowly onto the highway, made it home, and stacked the rest of the wood perfectly. It rained the whole time. Can you believe that? My grass got watered, too! God is good.

your fan,

jbyrd