I’m not unbiased of course, but my wife is the most amazing person. When I first met her, she had spent years doing construction and renovation work she didn’t want to do.

When we got together, she said she didn’t want to do those chores any longer, so I did the few that I could do, and hire other people to do the rest.

Once she realized that it was up to her, she decided she love doing hard, even grueling chores as long as she could decide which ones she wanted to do.

She loves stacking wood, for example, hard and exacting wood that is a lot harder to do than it seems. Greg Burch, our logger, says she is one of the best stackers he has seen.

Greg came by yesterday to drop off the last chord we will need for next winter, and Maria will go to work on her own creative, individualist stacking after the wood bakes in the sun a bit.

We have a great rhythm going. Greg chops the wood, and comes and dumps it. I pay him, Maria stacks it, and when she is up to date, Greg (he checks the stack when he drives by) comes over and dumps it by the woodshed, and then Maria stacks the new wood.

My role is to call Greg, pay him, and then yak with him about dogs and logging for a half hour or so. That’s tough work, but somebody needs to do it. Greg and I have become good friends, it is a complete joy to work with him and get to know him.

Within a week or two, the wood will all be stacked in and just outside the woodshed. We’ll put a tarp on it all in August to keep it dry for the winter.

I love preparing for the winter, I start doing this in early May. I never wait until the end of summer – everything is harder to find and twice as expensive.

But Maria’s wood stacking is a marvel, the icing on the cake.

I am impressed by the creative way Maria has come up with to build those corners, people always struggle with that. Her piles are secure and tight. That is not easy to do. It’s the same with her quilts, she just sees things people like me can’t see.

In the evening, she loves to go out in the back and toss some logs around and stack them. I can hear the thumping well into darkness when I write. I can’t toss wood around anymore, I accept it.

We have all the wood we need now for this upcoming winter, and all the hay we need in the barn.

I am proud of my quartermastering, we got the hay in just before the dry spell, some of the farmers can’t get their hay in now, it’s too dry. We are a good team.

Honestly, I never imagined that my wife would love to stack wood or do it so creatively. I sure can’t. But she is an artist through and through and everything she does, she does as an artist, creativity and with her own stamp.

She’s a curious combination of a Willa Cather girl and Frida Kahlo. I am so grateful to be given the opportunity to know and love someone like her, it is a daily miracle to me.