After a week's hiatus, the logging crew is back at work in the field and mountain behind our house. There is that low hum of machinery that at first saddened me, and when I first woke up this morning I saw the machines' lights far off in the field. A week or so ago John and I walked through the woods behind our house and looked at what the logging operation had accomplished. The back of the field itself is rutted and muddy, layered with stripped-off balsam branches with their fragrant needles still attached. There are several towering stacks of neatly trimmed logs, some of them with a diameter wider than from the tip of my finger to the center of my chest. The logs seem to be oozing out their life, and their ends are sticky with sap. There is a vast pool of sucking mud spread out from the little creek that runs back there, now dammed up by a corduroy road of logs so the enormous skidder can move back and forth from field to hill. The mud is smooth and deceptive--I tried to walk on it and sank quickly, would have gone up to my knees, I think, and definitely lost my boots if John hadn't hauled me out. I hope that they break the dam when they're done harvesting trees.

We walked through this scene and I decided to view it dispassionately, not as wreckage or carnage but as small-time industry, local economy. The skidder has cut a mud road straight up the steep slope, bordered and bolstered by logs too small to be of value but big enough to cut and place. Skidder roads branch off to the side every once in a while, off to what were thick stands of timber, I guess. Now the forest is simply lighter, more sky and wider expanses of earth, more saplings visible. It's hard to know how much of this is due to winter leaflessness and how much to the absence of culled trees.

They left the old--ancient--logging road that John and I have walked, that we think our homeowning predecessors walked on their way to their dairy farm a mile up the ridge. This road is not wide enough for a car or truck and so deeply worn that it has a sort of shelter. It meanders up and up the ridges, crossing little streams. In the logging and grazing past maybe it had good views on some of those rocky curves--now it is all woods. I have imagine generations of old Mr. Torrances as a bow-legged, bearded, good-natured but not deep-thinking fellows who lived for labor: tapped trees, milked cows, tinkered around the house. Ate the meals their wives cooked, slept in cold beds.

John and I worry that in some of the flat places where they have logged heavily they are in fact clearing home sites. We hope not. We like our isolation, the darkness behind us, the naked starry sky. We like the unbroken expanse of that eight-acre field, less than half of which we own. But now that the other half has sold, the logger placed markers--trees he cut and stripped by hand--along our boundary line. He knows that eventually John and I will fence ourselves in so we can have some animals. All this old man needs is markers to signal his territory and ours.

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John goes back to work today after a week off for Thanksgiving. Today commences my week of vacation. I will miss him while he's gone, but I have lots of projects going on. I have been working on family history, which is fascinating, labor-intensive and very exciting.

In two weeks John's entire maternal family will be here to celebrate an early Christmas. We will trim the tree on December 13th. I will play "Amazing Grace" and Christmas carols on the piano for Nana and the others to sing along.