Everything was fresh to me. Hours were long and exhausting; when I slept, it was complete, and when I was awake, it was complete. The days grew warmer and I wore fewer clothes. I could see my hands and arms growing brown, and as I learned to use the axe with more dexterity and pull the weeds without having to dig at their roots, I saw the muscles hardening in my arms and legs, could see them stretch and flex under the skin, and I delighted in all of it.

It took many days of work, no thoughts, just the labour, the effort of making things happen; perhaps that was why there were no memories or regrets, no pains or remorse. When finally the smallest, most hidden weeds were taken from the garden, I used the hoe to dig the earth down deep and turn it over, and the earthworms rolled into the sunshine and burrowed away from it, and then I drew the shallow furrows with the hoe and brought out the packets of seeds and the tiny tomato and green pepper plants, no flowers but only food, and waited to see what would come.

I still was sanding furniture, gently in the afternoons, outside, and as I finished the kitchen table I took a soft cloth and the oil and rubbed it into the wood, and as if it had been dying of thirst, as it had been dying for breath, the wood soaked it up, until finally it could hold no more, and it sat there in the sunshine and gleamed. It was the first perfect thing that I had done.

Late afternoons I would go in search of wood, now foraging farther, into the outskirts of the woods, which was a long walk with the axe, and I could not easily carry back what dead wood I found to cut. There were always dead trees, and always new living ones sprouting up, growing taller, so that the woods, by itself, stayed almost the same. I found I could manage, doing a little at a time, first cutting down a tree, then stripping off the branches for kindling, then cutting the trunk into sections for logs, and finally making the long, painful trips back to the cabin, loaded down with the wood. I realized, finally, that there must be an easier way, and devised and built a kind of sledge with a rope in front, like a toboggan, so that I could pile wood onto the sledge and pull the whole thing along by the rope. I was proud of that. It was hard work too, though, and often wood rolled off the sledge and I would have to stop and replace it, and the ground was rough and difficult to pull a heavy load over, but still it was easier than carrying it. I had two piles of wood behind the cabin now, one of kindling and one of logs, and both of them were growing.