Appalachia, 1962 – and Now
I split my first piece of firewood the morning after my father whipped me for skipping it.
I was ten years old. It was late September, and frost had crept onto the windowpanes like a silent warning.
I’d pulled the covers over my head that morning, pretending I didn’t hear the rooster, pretending I wasn’t the one who had to stack the kindling by the stove before school.
Dad found me still in bed. He didn’t shout. He didn’t need to. The belt made its point, and I made mine — right out to the woodpile with tears still burning my cheeks and fingers too numb to grip the ax properly.
“Don’t swing it like you’re mad at the world,” he said, standing behind me in his wool coat, arms crossed. “Swing it like you respect it.”
That line stuck. More than the belt. More than the cold.
I never skipped the firewood again.
We lived in a small clapboard house halfway up a slope in Breathitt County, Kentucky.
The kind of place where winter set in early and stayed late, where snow blew sideways through the cracks in the window frames, and where warmth didn’t come from a dial on the wall but from sweat on your back and the rhythm of splitting logs.
Dad said we didn’t chop wood for the fire — we chopped it for the people we loved. That way, no matter how cold it got outside, they’d never feel alone.
I’d split before school and again before dinner. In the summer, we stacked cords under the lean-to, high as my head. He let me mark the bark with chalk to count how many pieces I’d done — one mark for every ten.
It wasn’t a game, but he knew boys needed to see progress, needed to know they were becoming something.
Becoming men.
I still remember the sound of his cough before he died. It wasn’t sharp. It was low, hollow, like something had been scooped out of his chest and replaced with empty space.
He kept working long after the mines had given him up. Black lung doesn’t ask your permission, and it doesn’t care how many mouths you fed or how many Sunday sermons you never missed.
When the time came, we buried him in the cemetery behind the Baptist church, the one where the grass only grows on one side.
I put a small piece of ash wood in his casket — split by my hand, the clean grain still showing the groove of the ax. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had to say thank you.
Years rolled on like seasons up here always do — slow, honest, and full of hard ground.
I married a girl from Owsley County. Clara. Strong hands, softer heart. We raised two boys and a daughter, each one of them fed on squirrel stew, garden beans, and the smell of hickory smoke curling out of the chimney.
By the 1980s, jobs dried up faster than creek beds in August. The young folks left — Louisville, Lexington, even Ohio. “Ain’t nothing left in these hills but ghosts,” someone said at the diner once. I reckon he was half right.
My eldest boy, Matthew, came home for Christmas the year the sawmill shut down for good. He brought his son, Eli — just seven, eyes full of questions, hands soft from suburb living.
That morning, Eli stood on the porch shivering, watching me split firewood in the cold. I offered him the hatchet.
“Too heavy,” he said.
I grinned. “Only ‘cause your arms don’t know they’re strong yet.”
He blinked at me. I saw my ten-year-old self in that stare — unsure, stubborn, needing a reason. So I gave him one.
“We split wood,” I told him, “not for the stove, not for the chore. We split it to say: I was here. And I cared.”
That night, I helped him balance the hatchet. His first swing missed. The second bounced. On the third, he split the log clean in two. His mouth curled into the kind of grin you can’t buy with allowance money or screen time.
Next morning, I caught him out there early. Alone. Splitting kindling with the same crooked stance I once had. I didn’t say a word. Just stood there in the doorway, hands around my coffee mug, heart too full for speech.
It’s 2024 now.
Clara’s been gone five winters. Cancer — quiet but cruel. The kids call from the cities now and then, voices hollow through speakers, always in a hurry.
But Eli… he’s twenty now. Studying forestry upstate. Wants to “protect the land” like he’s guarding something ancient.
Says he’s coming back after graduation.
“Gonna rebuild your old shed, Grandpa,” he told me last week. “Teach some kids how to live off the land.”
I laughed. “First teach ‘em how to swing a damn ax.”
He grinned. “Already did. Scout troop last month.”
Yesterday, a letter came in the mail — actual paper, not email. From Eli. Inside was a photo: him standing in front of a bonfire with a group of little boys in flannel, each one holding a hatchet. The caption read:
“We split wood for the people we love.”
The world’s changed. God knows it has. Our hills have fewer voices now, and the ones that remain are softer, hidden behind cell towers and convenience stores.
But some things — some truths — don’t vanish. They get passed hand to hand, swing by swing.
And sometimes, if you’re lucky, they come back to you with a letter and a photograph that smells faintly of smoke.
Final line:
Long after the fire dies, the warmth of the hands that built it still lingers.
Appalachia, 2024
I hadn’t planned on swinging the ax that morning — not at my age, and certainly not after the fall.
The doctor had told me to “take it easy.” I smiled politely and nodded, but he didn’t know these hills, didn’t know this house. You don’t “take it easy” when the stove goes cold and the pipes threaten to freeze before sunrise. Especially not when a boy like Eli is due home tomorrow.
Still, my shoulder screamed as I stepped out onto the frost-bitten porch. The air bit sharper than usual, the sky a pale sheet of winter steel. I took one step toward the shed and felt my boot slide—
—and the ground rushed up fast.
