Winter is here now and we are having frosts each night. Janine and I took two days off from the building work to clear a lot of regrowth that has colonised our wood pile site. If I don’t clear these young trees now. It will be a massive and expensive job to take out and clear bigger trees and their stumps later. But more importantly, there are loads of weeds setting seeds that need to be cleared and burnt. Before I could clear the site and mow it. I had to cut up a lot of fallen trees that we didn’t ever get around to clearing up last year.

I was just so overwhelmed by the scale of the job of clearing up after the fire. There were other jobs that were more pressing at the time. Actually, everything needed doing NOW. But as that was impossible given our age and energy levels, We had to prioritise, a kind of palliaire sort of thinking. Cloaked in our selective thinking, or perhaps blinkered by it, we set about doing what we could manage and afford. Now that things are more settled, I can briefly get back to the cleaning up.

There were two things on my mind. It wasn’t just that the regrowth needed clearing to minimise the fuel load and therefore fire danger in the next hot summer, but all that wood laying on the ground needed to be removed, just to be able to drive over the site. Plus, as it is winter now. we needed to think about refilling the wood shed, as we are lighting the slow-combustion fuel stove in the kitchen every night to cook dinner, and also the slow-combustion heater in the lounge room.

All of the other trees that were burnt on our land are sprouting new growth from epicormic buds, but there are hundreds of dead trees that are going to fall sometime in the coming years. Is so dangerous in there that I will have to wear a hard hat when I walk in there. There is absolutely nothing that I can do about it. I will just have to leave it to sort itself out and stay out.

For the time being, we have loads of fire wood.