Splittin’ Wood, Running Water and Lying About Grand-brats

The stories in this column are true. Averett lives a dull life in rural Southside Virginia with his wife Management, two children and a rotating assortment of goats, dogs, cats, snakes and other local fauna.

We just spent Saturday in a geriatric wood-split-ting session. I had gotten the daughter a load of mill ends. For you city folks mill ends can be anything from the cut off ends of boards to butt cuts off the end of logs from the sawmill. This load was butt cuts, some of which were big enough for a moderate sized table. That is if you need a table where I dumped them. Moving them without heavy equipment was out of the question. In any case, three of us, the youngest being 61-years-old, volunteered to split them. The other two old-er guys apparently vol-unteered because they are nice. In my case I’m not sure why I volunteered. May-be I was concerned that the Grand-brats would get cold. Although at their usual rate of movement friction should keep them warm. In fact, it is surprising that Dauntless doesn’t spontaneously com-bust. Speaking of the G-brats,
I volunteered to keep two of them last week. After two days I asked my bride Man-agement why I would vol-unteer for something like that. The answer was “be-cause you are the Faux Pa.” That’s also why I split wood and many other things where G-brats are concerned. I am the Faux Pa. By the time the wood splitting was ended all three of us old guys were worn out, injured and exhausted. Worn out of course refers to the condition of our bodies re-garding years, age and mile-age. The exhausted was from splitting wood. We lost one fingernail, achieved a gash on a finger, injured a knee and all three of us had to take the rest of the day off. On a positive note none of us had heart attacks or anything like that and the G-brats and their parents will be warm for a few months. I think this running wa-ter inside the house is going to catch on. Everything is working as it should. I only have two vulnerable spots left to fix but who wants to fix everything? Where’s the excitement in that? For three wonderful days the water worked as planned. I had thawed the frozen pipes. Then the pressure started to drop. As a former plumber I knew exactly what had happened. One of the secondary water lines to the outside faucets had frozen and broken. It worked fine until it got warm enough to thaw then I had a leak. It should have been easy enough to find a puddle at one of the frost proof faucets but all were dry. I did find a little leak but that wasn’t what was causing the issue. I was looking for a major leak and there just wasn’t one there. After three days of low water pressure I finally re-membered I had tucked a frost proof faucet behind the barn. Management seemed to think forgetting a water faucet indicated something. She made unkind comments about age. By the time I found the leak I had a nice little pond behind the barn. You just can’t have too many ponds or water faucets. I almost had a major in-cident with the nameless G-brat. I was keeping him and he was standing by him-self and watching me. Then I noticed he was getting ready to take his first step. This created a dilemma. First steps should always be in front of mothers. I pushed him and he sat down. The other op-tion was lying and pretend-ing it never happened. The daughter said it would have been all right to lie about it but I don’t like to do that. In any case, my way worked and he took his first step in her presence. That is unless someone else lied about it.