Manual Labor

For the past two days, PawPaw has been engaged at manual labor over at Momma's house. She's got eight acres way out in the country and during the last hurricane, Gustav, her place took a battering. Two trees fell near the house and another fell on the garden.

She had someone cut the trees up, but two of them were big white oaks and one was a huge pine. My sisters decided that this week was the time to clean up around there, so PawPaw got pressed into duty as drag-it labor. For the past two days we've been dragging limbs to burn piles and I'll be we put a couple of thousand board-feet of wood through the fire. PawPaw's tired and the majority of the work is done. I had two of the grandkids with me while their father worked, and they got a workout too. It wasn't hard to put them to bed last night. I doubt their Daddy will have much trouble getting them to sleep tonight.

The tree is out of the garden, stacked and ready to burn. The garden is gone too. It's been mowed into lawn. Momma's roses survived and look great. The two trees behind the barn are still laying there, for the most part, but all the small limbs are gone and burned. All that's left is sections of tree trunk that are too big to move. We can walk through there now. I taught my sister to drive the tractor and we used chain to move the trunk sections so we can move about. I'll have to get the splitter out there and split them. That's a job for another day.

We'll be back at Momma's tomorrow morning, running a chain saw and cutting up stove wood for an elderly lady down the road. We'll cut a rick of small stove wood and have it delivered.

PawPaw's sore, but Momma's place is starting to look like Daddy would have wanted it to look.