Historical Setting, 629 C.E. Creek House in the Vosges Mts.
Vizsla would be much more at ease with a building project if he were told to use a surgeon’s blade. He is clearly befuddled by the ax. The first tree he chased down wasn’t felled so much as wounded, tenderly, so there wouldn’t be a scar. I made a joke about his fine surgical technique and then I asked what tool he preferred for cutting wood. He said he doesn’t chop living things, he “gathers” firewood. He never slaughters trees. But he seems a fast learner. He’s gone from barely scraping the tree to raising up the ax overhead gripped in a two-handed hold, then bringing it down onto the earth near the tree with the power of Zeus. Three whacks like this, and the tree would be down, if the ax were to actually touch the tree. But the earth still reverberates and surely any bears in the wood have gone into hiding. Maybe he can refine his technique so that this loft-build can proceed.
Harvesting the beams may not be Vizsla’s specialty, but planing the wood floor planks is. He splits and smooths the logs, then planes them clean, quickly and efficiently while I prepare the ladder.
It isn’t two day’s more work and two nights of crowded sleep before Vizsla and Hannah have a proper place in a loft under our roof. But he does sleep noisy.
From a vantage point of timelessness, I see the spanning of lifetimes. People come to us in generations finding themselves to be children and believing that those who are not children are a different species altogether. Then each fumbles from child to teen, believing always, childhood is someone else it never could have been who I am. And always, out there is that constant older person. The grandpapas and the ancient mothers of moms seem to be the never changing vestiges of aging. They are nothing to do with us, youngers, but for our names. When we turn generations into “others” in the same way we make strange tribes into “others” for warring, we make ourselves our own enemy of who we will inevitably become if we are gifted with long life.
In youth, the same person who grows old, has heaped upon the image of aging all of the infirmities of all oldness en masse. Oldness is stiff knees, weak eyes, deaf ears, mindless syllables, memories of forgetfulness, creeping spiders of darkness, … every collection of woes. No child would claim it could become her. But…
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 