Thanksgiving, in my family a day to eat turkey and cut wood.  Long ago someone said turkey was the bird for Turkey Day, and the country followed suit.  In the mid-‘90’s my brother Tim said Thanksgiving morning is time to gather firewood, and we’ve been joining him ever since.

It’s Thanksgiving morning 2003.  To my surprise, my father must go to the neighbors to borrow a chain saw.  Dad does not own one anymore, despite the fact that he was a logger back in his twenties and can wield a saw like it’s biting blade is an extension of his own body.  After graduation from farm work when he turned twenty, he hauled milk mornings for Jonas Glick, picking up the metal cans from a round of farms and dropping them off at Christiana Dairy to be processed, bottled, and sold.  Around that time he also started part time work with Lapp Lumber Company, a sawmill owned by Sam Lapp, a distant relative who’s house and business was located five minutes up the ridge from my grandfather’s valley farm.  Soon he was logging trees full time.  He was made a foreman and cut trees until he was twenty-eight and it was time to move on to DC and preach the Word.

If his old-timer skill is any indication, my father must have been one heck of a logger.  When he talks about his lumberjack days, his eyes spark and his body animates.

Thanksgiving 2003, and we’re all there in the woods—my nephews Joel, Josh, Justin, Blake, and Jordan; my brother Tim and Uncle Marv; my nephew-in-law Joey; my father and myself.  (The women are at home cooking; note the traditional gender roles.)  My brother has assembled two pickups, three chain saws, and a tractor with a hydraulic wood splitter, so we fall to.

First in the order of business—fell a dead tree, an oak who’s tall, decaying trunk and decrepit limbs belie some internal rot.

“You know, Dad, it’s kinda leaning downhill toward that fence,” my brother Tim begins, “and I, well, I thought I’d let it for you.”

My father sits to sharpen the saw blade, pulling a round metal file smoothly across each tooth.  He looks the tree up and down, sizing up an old, respectable foe.  The chain saw starts and he takes a deep bite.

I learned young the proper way to fell a tree.  Simple, utilitarian Mennonites, we respected the tree as a living thing, the sacred creation of God, but knew it better as wood and heat.  We had no spirit rituals, said no prayers.  Just bite a deep wedge out, low down on the side you want the tree to fall on, then cut through the rest of the trunk a little higher.  The tree starts to crack, then lean, you pull the chain saw out and get yourself away, and the tree falls, plop, right where you planned for it to fall.

At least my father always made it seem that simple.

Once, Jonas Zook, an elder in my parent’s church, asked my dad to come out to his suburban Maryland home and take down a tree in the crowded backyard.  It was a real occasion, with church folk and neighbors all standing around, scratching their heads, giving advice.  My father cut through the buzz with the sound of his saw, then cut through the tree.  In among lots crowded with fences, sheds, ornamental trees, the backs of houses, he took a tree that was leaning the wrong way and laid the tall trunk down right where he wanted it.

Well, we might have guided it with some rope.

My father always kept a chain saw near him, even in the city.  He was a Stihl man, and even now the Stihl brand colors— orange, white, and black— say “chain saw” to me.  I could go into the blue wooden shed behind our house on Douglas Street and see the oblong orange case.  I would touch it and feel the tug of the starting rope, hear the roar of the motor, see the blade sink past bark to the heart of a tree, taste the wood chips flying out behind.  There weren’t many opportunities for Elmer to practice his art in the city where privately owned woods are scarce and wood stoves few, but when a limb went down in a neighbor’s yard, or half of a twin-trunked tree fell behind the church, or a church family’s friend needed two oaks felled between houses and power lines, he was there.

This year, for our Thanksgiving morning tradition, Isabel serves us a wooding feast. In September hurricane winds came and beat upon the trees, and they fell.  On a low shoulder of the ridge that rises from the back of my uncle’s pasture and fields, uprooted trees line the grassy area where pasture surrenders to forest. Long trunks stretch luxuriously along the ground; canted trunks lean against the live trees that halted their fall.  One forms a complete arc that, at its high point, is eight or ten feet off the ground: I walk it like a bridge, the limber wood swaying beneath my feet.

In one place a metal fence post juts from a fallen trunk.  The tree must have impaled itself on the top of the post as it fell.  The fence is fixed, now, a new green post standing out in the line of old, drab poles.

My father and I drive past the farm, his boyhood home, to where a field lane cuts in along the stream.  No cows are in the field and the fence is down for us.  We drive uphill through the pasture to join my brother and nephews.

Stepping over cowpies, I walk to the edge of the hill and look out.  There the house and barn nestle into a fold of the valley floor, there the stream crooks its way through pasture to where its passing cuts a canyon through the wooded ridge, there the pond glitters in morning sun.  The pastures now are only a drab green, the fields brown and lined with dead stalks, most of the fall leaves gone, but still the view is breathtaking.

Behind me, my father starts to fell his tree.  He cuts the wedge.

The tree leans slightly downhill, but my father wants it to fall across the hill.  The chain saw chews its circle around the trunk.  My father leaves a high hump on the downhill side as he cuts.

There is my father in his blue coveralls (“coveralls are best for chain sawing,” he said that morning suiting up, “no loose ends to get caught anywhere”), his body hunched down over the saw, driving it on its path until it bites clear through the tree, through the circle of wood and into air again.  The tree pauses, unwilling to admit that it is now no longer tree, only trunk and stump.  My father pulls the saw away, steps back a few paces.  The tree gains momentum as it falls.  Wooomph! it hits the ground all at once and lies still.  The boys, who had been shooed back out of harm’s way, now come running.  Their boots dance along the newly felled trunk.

“That was cool, Grandpa.”  My nephew Josh admires the fresh stump.

“You know I used to do that dozens of times in a day.”  My father beams with the pride and adrenaline of a good cut.

“You’re somethin’, Dad,” my brother says.  “Forty years since you’ve logged and you can still put a tree within two feet of where you want it.”

When we lived in the house that we built on Woodland Drive, on land that we bought from my uncle just up the hill from the farm, handling wood was a part of the year’s rhythm.  In the spring and summer we cut and hauled wood, in the fall we split and stacked it, and in the winter carried it in to the basement where my father kept a roaring fire in the wood stove.  We had a thermostat and central heat, but the wood stove saved money.  Besides, there’s nothing like curling up on the sofa on a cold winter afternoon and napping to the crackle and pop of a wood fire.

I didn’t always enjoy the wooding process.  My father always wielded the chain saw, so it was my job to scurry around and pick up the cut logs, throw them onto a pile, then transfer them to a truck for hauling to the house.  Most times it was too cold, or too hot.  Sawdust got in my eyes.  Briars tugged at my clothes.  I would rather have been exploring the woods or inside reading a book, anything but working.

This Thanksgiving, though, I am happy to be out— the weather is unseasonably warm, I’m hanging with the boys, and I feel joy in working with others at a simple yet necessary task.

My brother inherited the wood bug from my dad and, though no lumberjack, loves his chain saw and made sure his house had a wood stove.  In the winter, taking care of that stove is his first and last chore of the day.  He keeps a stack of logs in the garage, throwing them into the house through a low door built just for that purpose.  His children did not grow up as close to the woods as he, but they indulge his peculiarities— of which a fascination with cutting and burning wood is only one— and the boys always look forward to Thanksgiving morning’s now-traditional wooding.

It’s been six years since I’ve been on one of these outings, six years of world-wandering since I’ve sat down to the feast at my sister-in-law’s table.  My sister Lydia keeps a picture from this era, labeled “Wooding 2000.”  I was in Oxford that fall, studying British literature for a term.  She lived in Tucson, Arizona, and was on a rare trip East with her two children, Blake and Jada.  Things had gone sour in her marriage that summer, her husband suddenly a strange bundle of drugs and depression, suicide messages and jail visits.  She and her kids needed some time away from that, some time around her own family.

In the picture, a small group in vests, jackets, and hoodies poses on the back of my brother’s truck.  My father stands with crutches, evidence of the broken hip that nixed his much-anticipated trip to England to visit me.  Blake goofs for the camera, two fingers in a peace sign at the end of a puffy green sleeve.  My sister smiles at the lens, direct, as if she hadn’t a care in the world, holding her pink-hooded daughter on her lap against a background of Thanksgiving-time forest.

As a family, it’s almost always been good for us to come home— whether to the streets of Kenilworth or to the pastures and woodlands of Lancaster County.  Having two homes has its advantages.  We have double the memories, double the places where we feel rooted and free, at home.

I’m pretty sure that the fun of this “Wooding 2000” was what eventually convinced my sister it was ok to ditch Tucson, cut ties with her husband, and move back here to Lancaster.  Pennsylvania wasn’t always a place she wanted to return to, but the woods reminded her that the place was home and could be one for her children as well.  Home is where we bring ourselves to find the familiar.

Which is why I was surprised to find that, this Thanksgiving, my father needed to borrow a chain saw from a neighbor.  What, my father without his trusty orange and white machine, “Stihl” cut in black letters onto its bar?  What could be more familiar to my father than a chain saw, what more a sign of home than hearing its woody roar, than stacking fresh-cut logs against the coming cold?

My father is getting older, and he knows it.  I guess I’m glad he’s let the chain saw go, an indication that his retirement is a more or less graceful one.

As our family sits down that afternoon to tables laden with turkey and stuffing and vegetables, I am happy that my life has come full circle again, back to the Pennsylvania home; happy that I am still a tree with limbs and leaves, not a trunk and stump; happy to be eating turkey again with my family in the afterglow of a successful Thanksgiving-day wooding.