One small completion

 Many things in life to unfinished, from old needlepoint projects to old car restorations.  Search on Craigslist for "project" and you'll find a wide variety of items for sale that have been revealed to the owner to never be complete--cars, motorcycles, furniture, houses.  

I've had one such project in the back yard--one of many, but I'll tell about this one--waiting for completion and today, now finished.  It's not much, really, but after several early mornings of hard work and persistence, I'm able to call it complete.  

It's my wood pile.  I'll use much of it this winter, but for now, it's all cut, split, and stacked, drying this summer for when the cold comes on and I decide it's time to fire up the wood stove as a bulwark against the frigid wind and snow.  

Some of the wood was fairly new, even some only a few days since being gathered and dropped in the yard, but some of it--and this is the key--has been back there for years.  Many years.  I had been gathering and piling up logs in preparation for the cutting, splitting, stacking, but much time had passed for some of them.  As I was tipping up some of the stumps to be split, you could see that earthworms were beginning to get comfortable beneath the logs, and in some, colonies of ants had taken up homes and burrowed tunnels for themselves, scurrying from the newly split logs in frantic haste, many of them carrying precious eggs, hunting for a new place to nurture them into being. 

In the past, rabbits, squirrels, and even a woodchuck had taken up residence or shelter in my wood piles, and mice were frequently evident in the wood I brought in to the house, so that Penny, the dog, sniffed carefully at the fragrant firewood.  

But for now, there is a vast space in the back yard, where the tree limbs and trunks awaited my effort, and now, after hours beginning at 7am at over 70 degrees, and this afternoon, now at 98 degrees, I can call it finished, an impressive woodpile, nearly six feet high, six feet wide, and over 20 feet long.  Add that to the smaller woodpile left from last year, and I think I'm good to go for next winter.