First Lumberjack Job

On Thanksgiving Monday Scott and I went to work cutting wood.

First, he carried the bow saw into the back yard and we felled a tree. It was a spindly thing about 12 feet high that has been dead at least all summer and looking pretty sad. We were sure to call "timber" even though I could hold the thing up with one hand.



Scott slung the bow saw over his shoulder and we hauled our freshly-felled timber to the garage, where I was working on reorganizing the garage. I had laid out a set of shelves on the ground, so I put Scott's log across the shelf and showed him how he could safely use the bow saw to cut it into lengths. For the next hour he sawed away at that log, cutting it into 16 sections of 8-10 inches each, while I worked nearby building some shelves. He was nearing the end of his labour when the Bishop and his wife walked by on their way home (they live a few houses down from us). She immediately took interest in Scott's work. She said that she had been planning to make little placeholders for her grandchildren for Thanksgiving dinner and she had wanted to cut little discs from a thick branch of a tree. She said that Scott's logs would be perfect, and offered to BUY two of them from him. She dug around in her pocket and found a quarter, a loonie ($1) and a toonie ($2). She gave him the toonie.

For the next hour Scott could talk of nothing but his great fortune in getting paid so well for doing such fun and interesting work. He said, "I am such a lucky boy" probably 15 times. It was the cutest thing. Our own little professional lumberjack.

I had the power saw out for my shelf project, so I offered to quickly cut the logs into the smaller sections that she needed. I earned nothing for my efforts. I am more of a pro-bono lumberjack, I suppose.