The Cherry Logs From the Home Hill

When Dad was a boy, his father showed him a stand of black cherry saplings coming up where an old pasture had gone back to woods, and told him to leave them alone.

He left them alone for seventy years. He cut the grapevines off them. He pruned the low limbs so they’d grow straight and clean.

Every fall he walked up there and looked at them the way some men look at a herd of heifers they’re proud of.

My mother, Ingrid, used to tease him that he loved those trees more than her.

He’d say that wasn’t true, but it was close, and then he’d kiss her on the top of the head, and she’d swat him with a dish towel.

This summer, Mom needed dental work. Not a filling. She’d been putting it off for years, and by the time she went in, the dentist in La Crosse wrote up a plan for a bridge and two crowns that came to a little over five thousand dollars.

Their insurance through the farm co-op covered almost none of it. Dad sat at the kitchen table with the paper for a long time that night.

Mom told him to forget it, she’d chew on the other side.

The next morning he walked up the hill behind the barn, and when he came down he told her the cherries were ready.

He said he’d always meant them for something that mattered, and her teeth mattered, and whatever was left would go to the grandkids.

That’s when Lyle came into it. Lyle is my cousin, the son of Dad’s older brother.

He’s 56, and he took over the sawmill in town when his father retired. The mill buys logs from half the farms in the county, and has for forty years.

In August, Dad called him and asked him to come look. Lyle drove out on a hot afternoon and the two of them walked the whole slope, and I walked with them because I wanted to hear the number.

Lyle counted twenty-two good trees, most of them sixteen to twenty inches across at chest height, a few bigger.

He knocked on the bark, he looked up into the crowns, and he said they’d go mostly to veneer and select lumber.

“Four thousand standing, Uncle Arvid,” he said. “My crew comes in, cuts them, skids them, hauls them. You don’t lift a finger. That’s a fair price, and I’m giving it to you because you’re family.”

Dad thanked him and said he’d think it over. On the drive home, he said four thousand was fair for standing timber, but he’d rather cut them himself.

Lyle’s crew would tear up the hill with a skidder and leave ruts that washed every spring.

“If I cut them and bring them in as logs, I’ll get more,” Dad said. “And the hill stays the way my father left it.”

I told him he was 80 years old. He said he was aware of that, and that he had been for some time.

So in October, my 80-year-old father went up that hill every morning after chores with his chainsaw, his wedges, and a can of bar oil.

He cut one tree a day, sometimes two if the weather held.

I came out on Saturdays with Mason, and we’d skid the logs down to the barn lot with Dad’s old tractor and a chain.

That hill is steep enough I don’t like to walk it in wet leaves, and my father felled every one of those trees by himself.