Wood

A beautiful bright autumn morning and we were off to Walsingham. Hanne Lene had booked us both a massage. I was in a quiet mood and so while I was waiting for my session I sat on a chair and meditated at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. However it was like market day there. A group of pilgrims attended by a couple of priests were going about the stations of the cross, singing and reading Bible verses at each. Folk were coming in and out of the shrine to light candles. And then almost next to me in the chapel, a holy mass began. So I slipped out the back way into a deserted little garden where I was able to sit and meditate in comparative peace. I had been there maybe twenty minutes or so when the silence was broken by a well dressed woman spouting F words, which was a bit of a surprise...her husband or partner looked mortified when he spotted me sitting nearby. Anyway it turned out that she had lost something or other though I never discovered what.

I had ordered a couple of loads of firewood so we had to be home for five. Just after five thirty there was a very positive knock on the door. I opened it to the smiling and ruddy face of Gary, and behind him, outside the gate, his wife and daughter. His truck was laden with dry hardwood and towing a trailer which was also fully laden. The whole operation ran like clockwork. If you have ever stood near the harbour on a small Greek island and watched the precise and orderly way in which a large ferry arrives, docks, disembarks and pulls away again, in a matter of minutes, you can imagine, on a smaller scale of course, how this family load and unload their wood. Gary in the driving seat reversing in the first load guided by his daughter while Frances leaves the kindling inside the gate. I give her the money and she is quietly counting it while Gary hitches up the trailer and reverses it back again to deposit the second load on top of the first, carefully allowing just enough space in the gateway for us, and any visitors, to get in and out. With a chewy smile and a wave, within five minutes they are all back in the cab and on their way home.
After they had left, I realized that two loads amounts to an even bigger pile than I had imagined; it will take a day or two to carry it all to the woodshed and I am not sure if there is room for all of it in there.