If you’re like most of our neighbors, you made good use of the recent unseasonably warm weather. Your leaves are raked; your holiday lights are up; and the Christmas decorations are poised and ready to fan out across your lawn the moment the Thanksgiving table is cleared.
But if you’re like us, I mean me and my family, you’ll be hanging holiday lights in the frigid cold this weekend, right after you finish raking the last of the leaves, and you’ll hope to have the outdoor Christmas decorations in place before it’s time to pack them away in the new year.
This is an all-too-familiar routine at our house.
Year after year, some of us inevitably find a way to miss that last perfect window of warm weather generously afforded for the season’s remaining outdoor tasks. As a reprieve from the sentence of a freezing afternoon spent atop a ladder, one last balmy day appears seemingly out of nowhere — yet some of us still fail to take advantage. I’d say we’re procrastinators but more on that later.
The seasonal switch from fall to winter is always a melancholy one. Away go the umbrellas and patio furniture, out come the rock salt and snow shovels. Spending nice days outside in mid-November is certainly a welcome opportunity, but they don’t keep you from wanting more. Or, worse, they might fool you to thinking more such days will actually come. Of course, inevitably at some point, they don’t. That point is now seemingly at hand.
Denial might be at least partially to blame. On some level, we probably don’t really want to admit that another year’s warm seasons are entirely behind us, that another winter is at hand, and that we dare not venture outdoors again until roughly Mother’s Day, give or take a month.
If this sounds a little like you, you’re hardly alone.
About two weeks ago, a fellow Little League coach approached me about possibly having our 2016 teams play each other in an outdoor practice game this fall before the snow flies. Sure, I told him, if we were lucky enough to get baseball weather this deep into the season, we should take advantage of it. Yeah, right.
And yet, there was a sudden 60-degree day on Sunday — that’s 20-plus degrees warmer than the temperatures we will likely play some real games in come spring. Oddly, on the very day that outdoor scrimmage could’ve been played, our team gathered for our offseason planning party, enjoying a day of bowling and laser tag at an indoor game facility instead.
But the weekend’s warm weather wasn’t entirely wasted. My children and I spent the majority of two days splitting enough firewood to ensure that future generations will still be able to warm themselves by the fire.
The removal of two dead trees on our property left us with scores of logs in need of splitting, a task that I’d been trying to get to for quite some time. The job undertaken in early October was first scuttled when the rented log splitter blew a gasket and started spraying hydraulic fluid all over the place.
Any regular reader of this column has probably gathered that I’m not exactly the handiest person in the world, so the extent of my knowledge on repairing a blown gasket on a log splitter is limited to knowing the route back to the rental place, within a block or two.
Each weekend in the interim brought either rain or scheduling conflicts, and so there those logs sat. Some of them came from the giant poplar that had died and been cut down years before, the remainder left from the removal of another dead tree last month.
And while we were sad to see both trees go, there is some small consolation in keeping the old logs on hand for firewood in lieu of paying several hundred dollars to have a comparable amount of wood delivered the next few years.
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I haven’t even mentioned the few spare logs cut from the apple trees in our backyard. When the tree cutter came to remove the dead tree, we had him trim the apple trees too, leaving the logs behind for me to later split. Apple wood is great to burn when smoking a pork shoulder, ribs or maybe even the Thanksgiving turkey, and will soon be put to good use. But that’s a topic for a future column.
That was how we spent our balmy weekend. I ran the log splitter, while the oldest child chucked me the next logs to split, and the younger two stacked the byproduct. Little did we know that a week later would call for a forecast of snow and lows in the teens.
No matter. As winter sets in, the log racks are stocked and ready to burn. That wood will come in handy – to help thaw our frozen bodies after finally putting up those Christmas lights.
Rob Manker is a freelance writer who lives, works, parents in Naperville.
Twitter: @RobManker