The dawn came in with a freezing drizzle from the east. The western sky was still clear to the edge of the front and the full moon was just about to slide behind the mountain. The air was the palest lilac color and seemed to vibrate against the last of the yellow moonlight. I fed the cattle another round bale, fed and watered the chickens and collected eggs. I stopped at the barn to feed the dogs and the cats then started the pickup to melt the ice off the windshield. The forecast called for freezing rain and steadily dropping temperatures that would soon turn the precipitation into a wet, heavy snow. For at least two days. Before a good snow you want to have your ducks in a row. No buckets left out, or tools or scraps of wood. Equipment is under cover, wood piles tarped, doors and windows nice and tight. It’s nice to have more forage than you need for the animals so if you really get snowed in they’ll be able to wait it out. Things like that. Today, however, I owed some payback so before the kids had even left the house I headed to the lake.
A friend of mine is a skilled carpenter and a caretaker of some of the summer houses on the lake. I call him to give me a hand when I’ve got two-man jobs on the farm and he calls me when he has them elsewhere. Our wives and children are close so we also share a number of personal interests beyond work, but that is where we often spend our time, mutually moving, building or otherwise altering the physical environment in a lifelong back and forth of mutual favors. He helps me sugar in early Spring often putting in 30 hours a week beyond his own obligations. I help him install a huge custom glass clerestory on the third floor of stone castle perched on the edge of a cliff in sub-zero weather. Its difficult to put a price tag on those kinds of jobs so we keep doing harder and harder tasks back and forth for one another just to keep even, increasing our effectiveness exponentially. For free.
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