Tomorrow morning will usher-in the 68th calendar year I’ve seen. I take note of that. I mark it. I say it out loud. And then I get busy livin’.
I remember when it felt to me like 1973 — the year I’d finally get my driver’s license — couldn’t get here fast enough. Time crawls when we’re young.
Now the days are a blur. I find myself reaching out and grasping at moments, holding on, in vain trying to stop time.
Instants blink and slip away, spinning out of sight. They always have.
Age, if we take its lessons, shows us that the best we can do, all we can do, is to savor moments.
It’s been awhile now, but at some point I stopped living for weekends. I quit blocking out and shutting down ’til The Next Big Thing in my life. I began paying attention to what I passed by and passed through instead of constantly calculating how soon I’d get where I was going.
Thinking back, the turning point may have been in the ’90s. I was riding the MetroNorth from New Haven to New York, as I often did, and on this particular day a winter storm slowed the train’s progress.
I’d exhausted the work in my briefcase. I began to look out the window.
Keep in mind that this is a densely populated urban run, not The Scenic Route. I gazed upon downtown streets and old neighborhoods, tenements and ghettos, snowplows and ambulances, food carts and fender-benders.
There was so much more between the leaving and the arriving than merely passing the time. I’d been missing all of that, and from then on it was a matter of intent to experience Life’s moments and not just its events.
The pace of hours and days and years is constant. What we do with that time — the moments — makes all the difference.
All the difference.
Well, I got the sunshine I asked for. This would be the first of a long, seasonable stretch of 20s-to-40s days, ideal for working outdoors. The big, jumbled woodpile near our well has been calling to me, and today, at last, I answered.
First I hitched the cart to the Ranger, gathered a week’s burnables, deposited it in the barrel and set it alight. Then I pulled the emptied rig over near that small mountain of bucked wood and dug into it.
This was no tidy, well-maintained woodpile — it had been sitting there untended for over a year, all but buried in fallen leaves, soaking up rain and snow, its bottom layers in the dirt. I fully expected to find some of it unusable due to rot and such. The question was, how much could I salvage?
The answer, it turned out, was right around 75%. I’m okay with that.
I hauled away three full loads, buggy and cart, and dumped them near our neatly stacked cordwood. That yielded two respectable piles — one hardwoods (destined for the woodstove), the other cedar (for our outdoor fires).
There they’ll wait for me to bring a splitter up from Deb’s cousin’s place and process them for stacking and proper seasoning.
With our massive brushpile nearby, I couldn’t resist also lopping off the ends of several hardwood logs. That wood was in very good shape, too, held off the ground and much drier. I managed to buck more than a dozen stove lengths.
When today’s work was done, I’d produced a decent addition to our supply. It needs a good period of drying, so it’ll be next winter before we burn it.
Once I had everything put away, I walked around behind the cabin to find Deb prepping the gas grill for our New Year’s Eve meal of burgers and (her specialty) skillet potatoes. We’d postponed that feed from Christmas Day on account of the chill, and honestly, by the time we got around to grillin’ today it was just as cold.
But the meal went on. It was amazing.
We haven’t decided how we’ll toast the New Year tonight — and by that I mean that we don’t yet know if it’ll be beer, bourbon or Jack.
In any case, from all of us on The Mountain to all of you, Happy New Year. And may 2024 be something a whole lot better than I expect it to be.
To send you off on this New Year’s Eve, here’s a video from Survival Dispach that Deb and I watched over coffee this morning.
If you want to see what we saw, you’ll have to commit an hour and six minutes. Don’t judge the video by its title, just watch — and listen.
Whatever conclusions you might draw from the conversation between these two men is secondary, really. More important, I think, is noticing what it looks like when clear-eyed, Liberty-loving folks talk about the way things are and make rational predictions about what’s to come.
It’s the kind of conversation that Deb and I often have with friends and neighbors here in Ozarkansas. We consider ourselves fortunate.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB
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