Sweater Weather

Imagine a grassy flat. The grass is yellow now, summer has drained and bleached the life from it. It is brittle and whispery under your feet.

Imagine that the hill is balding in patches, and cracked dry clay is bare before the sky. The bare patches are grey. The clouds above are white, but they look grey with the sun behind them. The sky has patches too, of brilliant, almost dark blue, but the clouds are covering most of the sky.

The wind is blowing and it is cold. Not brutally cold, but chilly. “Sweater weather,” your brain says, and then says it on repeat. “Sweater weather. Sweater weather. Sweater weather.”

Imagine the smell. The brush pile. The kind of tree, called laurel, or bay, or bay laurel. Imagine the sharp smell of those blade-shaped leaves.

The branches are long and you pile them up, taller than you, now higher than your hands above your head, now further than you can throw.

The wireless radio has some static crackling through the song, but you can hear the words clearly enough. “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose,” sings a woman’s voice. You do not know her voice. You might know the words, you aren’t sure.

The pile is too big, and the man puts on the orange helmet and the orange chaps and lifts the orange chainsaw.

Smell it now: the damp promise of the clouds. The baked earth, cooling. Leaves only just clinging to their branches, the threat of Fall, their fall, not far away. Now the roar and whine of the chainsaw, and you can smell the sawdust spraying from its racing blade.

Gasoline too, gasoline and sawdust.

Imagine the man is your father. He isn’t, but imagine he is. Imagine him cutting down through the huge pile, halving it, halving it again, compressing large branches and their large gaps into smaller sticks, the pile now only up to your waist and a little wider than it was. 

You go back to piling the wood, higher, higher, higher. The song on the radio changes. You don’t know this one either. Even with the chill winds blowing, you get warm piling wood, and so you fold up your sweatshirt and put it with some of his tools in the wheelbarrow. The woodpile grows monumentally again and is again cut down to size.

Not much more to pile up now. Soon he will have finished splitting firewood for winter, and you will have prepared a wonderfully huge bonfire.

Are you imagining it?

Are you? Good.

Good.

So am I.