Non-Fiction by Michael Stone
My whole job this fall was to move a pile of rotting logs through an acre and a half of woods to another pile of rotting logs. I have not yet moved all the logs but I have spent some time thinking about this, my job, and how easy it is to put gloves on and push a wheelbarrow load of old oak to a meadow a few hundred feet away. Can it be called oak? Some of it is dirt. Some of it is so rotted that it weighs less than my hand. Yet some of it is heavy and thick, taking up half the wheelbarrow load in size and all of it in weight, unconsumed.
I am not very good at my job. I haven’t done it in a few weeks — the whole point is that it should be getting done. The pile is an eyesore and my parents would like to move this eyesore to a hidden location, a brush pile. This brush pile consists of sticks, branches and logs under a few tall pines. The ground underneath is soft, meshy and covered with needles. With the addition of rotting oak logs the brush pile is becoming a mound. This mound is technically on my parents’ property, though the lines get blurred back there.
Other features of the back meadow include a deer blind our neighbor from across the street put up a long time ago (he’s getting old and hasn’t been to the meadow since his wife died), a wildflower patch that blooms and dies quickly every year by the edge, a workshop for the retired pothead doctor, and the yellows and greens that make up the meadow itself. If a less suburban family lived here it could be a garden. Though October is getting more and more intense the leaves are for the most part still attached to the surrounding trees.
One reason I’m not good at my job is that I use a wheelbarrow instead of a trailer attached to a lawnmower. The wheelbarrow is actually more convenient; the trailer is finicky to back up to the piles of wood, and I would spend more time hooking the trailer back up to the lawnmower after loading than I would moving the logs. The wheelbarrow takes longer but its ease-of-use saves my mental health from collapsing instead of swearing and kicking at a lynchpin and trailer hitch.
I like walking in the woods without engine noise. The wheelbarrow is rusty and it bounces in holes on the path dug by the lawnmower, its less responsible older brother. It makes very little sound, at least to me. Squirrels that crash through undergrowth as I clomp by. Wind makes the trees creak. Unidentified mushrooms have popped along the trail after nights of rain.
Beads of sweat on grass, worn spots where the wheelbarrow has been. I turn left to the brush pile. In the wheelbarrow logs jolt, shedding spiders, worms and slugs. Filaments of white and orange fungus grab at other logs from the dirt they’re making. I dump the logs in free space or pile them on others, back up, turn around and walk through the meadow, turn right, and roll the wheelbarrow through the woods to my parents’ backyard for another load.
This is how I’m paying rent. Moss encroaches on my parents’ house every year; they spray it and it comes back. The rot is constant. In the woods there is always a tree falling over, a trunk choked with vines, young shoots sprawling for a piece of forest real estate. It’s cruel. Every organism does what it needs to do to survive.
I’m not very good at my job but I’m getting on my feet in lieu of rotting myself. When I go back to the woods and spend a few hours moving logs I’m participating in some inevitable connected move.. I bully logs on a wheelbarrow path to an arbitrary pile in a meadow. When the ground eats me too and I don’t have to fight it, I hope I rot in one place.
Michael Stone is a poet from Kalamazoo, MI but the only way to read his work is to make him food. He works in youth development in Grand Rapids and makes music under the name Desert Golfer.