Le Stevenson
Sister Becky retired on October 1, 2024 and to celebrate this end of a rich and long teaching life we decided to disconnect her from her computer and head out on a walking trip, or maybe you’d call it a hiking trip through the middle of France. We settled on the Stevenson trail, the secular steps of a secular man, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, that parallels the religious path of those pilgrims walking toward Compestello. I thought of us as pilgrims as well, walking our way toward a less anxious, and more present life. Stevenson, writing of his journey that set the trail’s route said it well: “When the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?” So for six days, we had nothing to do but worry about the next step, the next meal, the next bed for the night. And that simple life worked its magic on us, even if we did not walk with a donkey named Modestine. We walked, instead, with Thomas, Becky’s son, who served donkey-like to carry the heavy pack. He was also lead laugher, his laughter carrying us down the trails.
Wood Pile
Through the winter months when my friends are going to the gym, taking yoga or pilates, I’m cutting wood. It’s my gym, my church, my movie night. Last year I had a few trees taken down so that from the top of the ridge where my house perches I have a pocket view of the Catskill Mountains. I felt badly about cutting what were mostly beech trees, so like the hunter who decides to take a deer and eat every part: heart, liver, thighs and knees, I decided I should use this wood. The difficulty is that these trees are down a hill and all I had was a little handsaw.
I cut my logs about eight inches in diameter, and about 36 inches long (it is never, however, this precise). This part of the cutting is the most satisfying, a sort of meditation on an outsized game of pick up sticks. What will drop easily? What will I have to support, and what will fall if I take this piece here? I pile these in one place and carry them up the hill. It was during this phase that a young friend, Remi, pointed out I should be using a better saw. A little research later and I had a Silky Katanaboy, a work of art that slices through wood like butter.