It is cold this Friday morning. 34 degrees outside. There are still a few potted plants outside, but they should be ok.

The gloves and knit hats still have not climbed up the stairs from their cedar closet.

The trees have lost about half their leaves.

This time of year is expressed in this week’s Books by the Foot newsletter.

There has still not been a killing frost.

I split wood when I got home last night.

I needed the exercise.

The splitter roared to life when the cord was yanked. I pushed the choke wire in, and its sputtering became rhythmic. I set a big log in the cradle and pull the lever. The wedge slowly moved forward, pushed by the hydraulic rod.

There’s satisfaction in this work. I cut the wood (almost always already dead.) Haul it. Leave it in the barn to dry for a minimum of six months. When cold weather comes, I’ll fill the cart with firewood and roll it toward the house. I haven’t put the two big cast iron rings on the porch yet, so I’ll carry wood inside directly in the two black canvas totes. This time of year, only small fires are needed. I let them burn out overnight. There’s no need to stoke the fire when the daytime temperatures are in the 60s.

I had lunch with an old friend yesterday. We went to the venerable Gladchuk Brothers (since 1988.) Wonder Book used to have video meetings there once a month for years. It was quiet, and we could discuss how many copies of movies we should order to rent of upcoming new releases. Those were the times of Top Gun and Ghost.

“Do we need 50 copies of that?”

The movie studios would pay for lunch for four of us and the rep.

When a big video release would come out, we would have to be strict about its “Street Date.” We couldn’t put the movie out for rent until that day. If we got caught doing that, there’d be implications. We often had lines out the door when a big hit got released.

This friend has led a magical life. His next adventure is “around the world in two months.” He and his wife will start in the Canary Islands. Then on to Casablanca and a tour of Morocco. He will go on alone to Cairo, Abu Dhabi (for camel races, etc.), Singapore… L.A. to see a cousin he hasn’t seen since they were 10 years old and back here. There are other stops in between, but I can’t remember them right now. I was just in awe of his adventure. Maybe I need to travel again soon. Right now, the “big project” is all-consuming. We will see how long that lasts. There’s a teleconference this afternoon to discuss what’s next—if anything.

Then my friend told me that he and his wife are thinking of moving into a retirement community before too long.

Dawn is beginning to glow on the horizon. The sunrise has moved south into the forest. It won’t return to view until March. That seems so far away. It is a winter away. Here’s the last sunrise I saw.

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Sunday night

I did it!

I made progress on the old dust-accumulating carts loaded with problematic material.

There were a lot of treasures I’d put aside on them.

Fate is laughing because we aren’t desperate for carts as we normally are. A welder friend found 54 of these “tanks” from the defunct Baker and Taylor facility in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania.

(They are reminiscent of something in Dr. Who, aren’t they?) I don’t think these will ever break like the new ones we got recently. Their wheels are already bending on some. But the price was great!

The price was great on the ugly tanks as well. I agreed to buy 54 of them. That may create another problem. Where to put them?

The weekend wore me out. The old dusty material required even closer scrutiny than the usual “Chuck” material. Come Sunday evening, I was pleased with my efforts.

A huge pile of material for the stores. Tubs of books for Madeline and Annika to research. Carts laden with fixed-price material for the internet. Posters and prints and more valuable books for the stores.

And I stickered a large quantity of framed material.

The stores won’t be happy. That much “art” at once makes displaying things difficult.

I was tired and sore and worthless when I got home with the three dogs. It didn’t help that a neighbor invited me to drop in for a Redbreast 12 and some football. His wife was out of town. I haven’t been to their home since before COVID. I drive past it twice a day. We watched the Bills-Chiefs football game. I don’t care much about football, but I grew up a Bills fan in Amherst, New York. (I also root for the Chiefs to lose. There seems to be something arrogant about that team.)

It gets dark so early—sunset is at 5 p.m.—that there’s almost no time for work outdoors at home. Monday night, I felt the need to do something physical. The cord on the heavy Husqvarna leaf blower was tough to pull, but after it was primed and choked, it came to life after a few tugs. Fortunately, the wind was slightly from the west, so it was a little easier to blow the leaves covering the drive downhill. I’ll need to do this again a few more times. There are still a lot of leaves clinging to the trees.

That kind of work is satisfying.

Then it was inside. I lit a fire in the Vermont Castings woodstove but didn’t pay attention to it. Leftover pizza was my dinner, and I watched a repeat of a Caps hockey game.

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Monday, the shelving contractor was finally returning to the Gaithersburg store to reconfigure some of the ancient bookcases put in during the 1970s by my old mentor Carl Sickles. We also brought a vanload of similar shelves that had been removed so old drywall walls could be removed.

Carl made a lot of… ummm… “quirky” bookcases early on. He grew up on a farm during the Depression and could squeeze a penny so tight that Abe’s eyes would bulge. On this bookcase, he salvaged scraps of Masonite—thin strips—and used them as backing to keep the bookcase square. It’ll be fine with solid bookcases on either side of it.

There was also more of the ancient puke-green shag carpet exposed.

I remember visiting Graceland, and Elvis had a room carpeted with similar material. If I remember correctly, it carpeted the walls and ceiling as well.

During the demolition, we struggled to keep customers out of that section. People are drawn to chaos. There was a nanny (I surmise) who was leading seven little girls, maybe 8 years old. They were all wearing berets and looked straight out of Madeline. I finally put up police tape to keep them out of the kids’ section.

It was a mess, as a few dozen bookcases had to be quickly emptied so they could be disassembled and rearranged into straight rows. The place will look much better, but there are a lot more bookcases that need to be built and installed.

This is a new view never seen before. Walls were removed and bookcases relocated to create it. That window hasn’t been visible for 50 years.

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The rest of the week flew by. When this load goes out, we will have shipped 130 Gaylords loaded with books.

For some reason, I thought it was a good idea to buy a 20-pound turkey. It was only 84 cents a pound.

The dogs will feast off that for a long time.

Ovi (Alexander Ovechkin) scored his 900th goal. I saw that Caps game live on TV.

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Another week.

As always, there is introspection. Perhaps I dwell on that too much.

My friend Laurelle (Swan’s Fine Books) sent me this humble Oxford poetry anthology.

It contains J.R.R. Tolkien’s first printed work.

A poem about goblins, of all things.

When I think about Tolkien, I think about the triumph of good over evil. But I also think about endings.

An old friend of mine passed away last Saturday. He had been my dentist long, long ago. Then he moved his practice to Pennsylvania. When I moved to Waynesboro in 1990, he became my dentist again. Then we became golf buddies and friends. Then we drifted apart. He got remarried. Then about 12 years ago, he suffered a catastrophic heart attack on the golf course. He never recovered and was very frail ever since. My son married his wife’s daughter a couple of years ago. They reconnected after not seeing one another since Montessori. I visited their one-year-old baby on Wednesday evening. He is a beauty. Running. Kicking balls. Throwing balls. Chirruping with glee. He will likely live to 2100 and perhaps way beyond.

Endings and beginnings.

Sigh…

What does it all mean?

Maybe I’ll find it in a book someday.

Maybe I’ve already found it in “books.”

This is the 434th Friday there has been one of these stories.