Is it piling or stacking sticks or logs?
By Robert LaFrance
Every fall I am amazed at the amount of sawn-up stovewood that goes by this place and even more surprised at the amount of stovewood I have to pile. I am even more surprised by the fact that I don’t find piling wood a brutal hateful job as I used to.
Before I go on to a dozen or more totally unrelated topics, I want to comment on what we might call the ‘nomenclature’ of stovewood. On TV the narrators refers to burning ‘logs’ in the fireplace or stove and where I would refer to ‘piling’ wood they use the word ‘stacking’ it. Can somebody explain that? I can’t picture myself putting a log in a fireplace. A 20-foot rock maple log would take a while to burn.
By the time this column appears in our local newspaper the New Brunswick election will be history. I have a feeling it will be a majority government in which case, if a certain party gets into power, we had better start cringing, because Perth’s hospital will soon be suffering because of all the money that Covid-19 has cost. Governments cut health and education but never their own perks.
We who live in this area all know that Horizon Health has been champing at the bit for ten years to close Hotel Dieu; this is their big chance. They have moved the operating rooms, laundry services and food services to the city; the wild horses will close everything they can if they have a majority government.
In a recent column I referred to my friend ‘the late Jamie Solosky’ and was rather surprised a few days later when Jamie phoned me and noted that he was neither late nor feeling under the weather. “That was my third cousin once removed Judy Solosky,” he said, and that wasn’t the worst of it. “Judy, while often late, is not that kind of late,” he said. “She is habitually late and in this case, reported in a community newspaper, she was two hours late for church. She sat on the church step for four hours until someone – a reporter – came along and rescued her.”
It reminded me of the story I once wrote for Brunswick News: “SVHS students tackle pottery”. At least that was the headline. The story was about poetry.
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In the past month I have received four notices from the four banks we deal with (we are very wealthy and can’t trust our huge portfolio to any one bank) and every one of them said that that bank was NOT going to increase any service charges during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Four time I received one of those notices and had to quickly sit down before I fainted. Instead of simply not raising those specific charges, the banks began their letters by saying something like this right here: “(Such and such a bank) have scheduled up to a 300% service charge in several areas…” and then they went on to say that because of their love of the community and its people they were going to forego that increase. Hidden in the text were several hints that when the pesky pandemic is done the banks will return to their old style of vast increases in service charges.
When my son was about fifteen, I took him into a certain bank in Perth and opened an account for him, in his name. At the same time, to help him understand the process, I opened an account for myself. Each of us had an account balance of twenty dollars. We ‘high-fived’ each other.
A year or so later he and I went in to that bank to deposit some money. No problem for him to deposit his money, but they couldn’t find my account. Finally an assistant accountant dug it up among closed accounts. He showed me that for each of ten months after I had deposited the original twenty dollars, the bank had taken $2.00 service charge. They had only taken $2.00 from him, starting when he had turned sixteen.
“What service did you perform to justify taking my money?” I asked. “You borrowed twenty dollars from ME and, instead of rewarding ME, you charged ME.” He then gave me to understand that I was being selfish and not aiding and abetting the bank’s piracy.
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I am glad to see that the St. John River, that flows through Perth-Andover every day (to quote E. B. White about a river in Maine) is once again being used for recreation. Other than a couple of annual bass tournaments, it was underused and almost unused for years.
Now the village of Perth-Andover has spent a good deal of money to set up a dock and recreation area and people are using it. I have not seen the river that busy since the 1980s when a post office employee named Lindsay Mutch persuaded people to get everything from pontoon boats to World War II Russian submarines out onto that body of water that is often called “The Rhine of America”. I wouldn’t know; I have never seen the Rhine River.
To change the subject from river water to filthy swamp, I have some advice to give to all those millions of Americans who want to get Donald Trump out of the White House (from where he will have to be dragged kicking and screaming): Don’t pile it on so much.
Trump, possibly the most despicable (alleged) human being ever to be U.S. president, has at least twenty criminal charges against him, but people have heard it all. Ease off and let him shoot himself in the foot where he already has those famous bone spurs, the ones that kept him out of Vietnam where all those ‘suckers and losers’ died.
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