Sunday 23 March 2014

Small fires and large rain




Woodworks Saturday morning. There are so many broken trees this season that getting a truckload is just a matter of menial labor. Not to mention there is something wildly erotic about a large man splitting logs with one blow. We had such good sex after we got home, I was trembling well into the evening.
I forget how much I love the woods. They are my opposite of deserts. Deserts, flat and timeless are my favourite scape, but as far removed as they are from urban jungle, their opposites are calm, airy, uncomplicated forests – the kind that offer all the protection and threaten no harm. Something fundamental binds me to these places, perchance a former life. I’ve felt at home in them even as a small child. Going in my hearing gets better, my sense of smell, my sense of presence; I become intuitively aware of the rough terrain and my step is more voluminous as opposed to pavement-walking, room-crossing linear. I notice the contrast between a human smell and the smell of bark, soil and blueberries. Not a bad smell, just very complex and commanding. Instantly I get the urge to run, not stroll and to hunger, not diet. Elements come pounding in, like tamable wolves at the door.
We were six and we actually got plenty done – a lot more than we expected and a lot more than G feared once the saw broke. Without him taking over was easier, as I tend to make the better taskmistress (have almost a lifetime of experience and usually see the broader picture – shall we recall the infamous millstone incident?), but for obvious reasons five men will never listen to a cunt in such surroundings. The ensemble was textbook group dynamic – a lover, a colleague, a child… these all have matching ambitions from different directions, so if it was up to me, the process would have been even smoother. But of course, once I opened my mouth to assign work, I was instantly called a bossy bitch. Even if three out of six have never before actually cut a trunk in half and don’t really know much about trees. Hard to explain to a bunch of city self proclaimed alphas that no, the spruce bark beetle doesn’t crawl onto beeches after they’re left aground. Only spruces. Different bark altogether. Still, for all their mockery and bitching, they achieved heaps in a relatively short time.
The whole while I was pretending we are building a house. Well, a woods cottage. Somewhere very far away, somewhere very beautiful. I have a deep passion for large rain and small fires. Summer storms, when the canopy of trees are swinging wildly, and small bonfires or fireplace logs embering crackingly… Where best to live a life of these tiny wonders than in a vast forest? That I could do. Exist in solitude, as a weird witch, making food from what he brought home from the hunt with berries for dessert and keeping two fat sheep for wool. I think that is the third on my list of heavens. To be healthy and young and married to a man who can strangle a bear and yet still deliver butterfly kisses to my face every evening. I don’t think that sort of existence would be dull at all. Not at all ambitious, but perpetually engaging and simplistic. Terribly intimate, too. With a pinch of adventurous. In fact, we’d get pretty fucking far if he listened to me more when it comes to organized menial enterprises. 

Know what I mean?

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