Hear Every Thought, See Every Dream

For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice.
- John Burroughs

I have been married for thirteen years, today.

Anyone who tells you marriage is easy is either lying, or not trying. Don't get me wrong: it's been an enjoyable thirteen years. I wouldn't trade the time, or the person with whom I spent the time, for anything. However, there is no bargaining, haggling, or short-changing; the price to be paid is exactly as posted, due upon reciept, and payable until death-do-you-part.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and try an analogy: keeping a marriage happy is like keeping a cabin warm.

You need to burn wood to keep your cabin warm. In order to have wood, you have to collect it, or purchase it, or chop it yourself (usually a combination of all three). All of these things take time and/or money, and you need to have fuel, or your cabin gets cold.

Gathering wood takes time, and is pretty easy, but doesn't really provide good wood for heating. It's usually pretty small pieces, good for starting fires, but not much for maintaining them (enough symbolism?).

Purchasing wood is always an option, but if you only do this, you'll never learn how to chop it yourself. Whenver your woodpile gets low, you'll find yourself buying more wood, and there will come a day when there is not really enough money to buy more wood, and ... I'm just going to leave it at that.

Chopping wood yourself is hard work, but I feel it is the most rewarding. You can see the woodpile grow as you split the logs and stack them up. When you take the wood off the pile to burn it later, you might remember a particular log that was knotty and bound up your blade, but once you got through it, you felt accomplished. You might find yourself obliged to cover the woodpile with a tarp in bad weather, because you don't want to see something you worked so hard to create damaged in any way.

I admit there have been times I have let my woodpile get low. I've burned my hand trying to use gathered wood that was too small for the fire. I have had to work hard to coax flames from wood that was left out in the rain. I've wrangled with a lot of knotty oak.

Thank you, my wife, my friend, for tolerating my irregular wood-chopping, my poor stacking skills, and my occasional frustration at a tough chop.

Thank you for trusting me, that I want the warm cabin, and am willing to work, sacrifice, be patient, and love.

Until another time,
Salt