Always about this time of year, I experience once again my love-hate relationship with my woodpile. So much time and energy is spent on it the rest of the year- buying, cutting or collecting it, then stacking it, then carrying it into the house – that it’s hard to imagine it can disappear so quickly.

But it does. And all that effort vanishes like the smoke up the chimney, for a fire that will go on needing to be fed.

And it makes me a bit sad knowing all those trees, too, that grew for years and years lay in pieces in the pile, separate but equal now in their shared purpose. Whether they died of natural causes or were cut down, it makes no difference.

It’s become a lesson for me in impermanence: How something can exist one moment or for years and be gone in an instant. And how so much effort can vanish, too, although not always without a purpose. It’s a lesson I’ll be reminded of next winter, when I once again start piling up the wooden bones.