If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where that heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail denied those who spend the weekend in town astride a radiator.
We sensed that these two piles of sawdust were something more than wood: that they were the integrated transect of a century; that our saw was biting its way, stroke by stroke, decade by decade, into the chronology of a lifetime, written in concentric annual rings of good oak.
