There's something in my shed that lets me be some of what I was.

In the week I bought my house, I bought myself an axe. The decorative trees, planted there three or four decades before, promised no end of loose wood to tidy up. I intended to be ready to handle that as I always had.

I didn't exactly grow up on Walden Pond, but the story of my coming of age is rustic: the story of the building of a family home at the end of an abandoned logging road. From eight to eighteen, I grew by stages in the woods - from clearing brush on the land my father had spotted and bought, to harvesting bulldozed trees for the fuel heating the house put in their place.

My family learned how to use the tools that managed wood, especially the men of us. From keeping wood stoves at constant heat for hours, I learned to split firewood just slightly off-center, for different sizes, to give options for when fires needed just so much fuel. My brother built split-rail fences and bridges over creeks from trees that fell out there, using no power other than his own. My father is the only man I know of who hit his wife in the face with an axe - on two separate occasions - and continued to be happily married for decades after.

Those woods and those tools helped define us. Men who could build from plans of their own. Forgivable men, with backswings that must be respected, and fuel to make just the right fire. To the extent that anyone sees us that way, it has something to do with the wood.

(Oh, shut up. You know what I meant.)

So the first thing I got with my house was an axe. A hatchet would have been the best match for the jobs most likely to really be done, but an axe was what I most wanted. I once had been good with the thing, before I went urban and bookish, and thought I had the right precision to use it when branches would fall.

It has gotten quite a bit of mileage, right up through the work of today. My trees all together stretch up hundreds of feet, and part of them always falls dead. Spring and summer months each shake out enough fuel for a wood stove to run for three hours. I find it mostly after storms, and make more of the work than I should because I enjoy it. I gather the randomly sized branches in a spot, and make evenly sized lengths for my trash. Varying just enough for different lengths of burn, though my suburb would frown if I set it afire.

The axe is now notched, in need of good grinding, but ain't that the state of us all. I had just a few branches to deal with this day that were larger than breaking by hand, so I fetched the right tool from the shed. (No need to turn on a light - it's been stored the same way for sixteen years, and it seems to leap into my hand when I reach.)

I cut with it almost by instinct, as far as the where and the how. I understand grains and comprehend greenness, and how a steel wedge might apply. In this way, I am what I was, back when my body was only mostly grown, when I'd cut fallen wood to make fires. I move in the same manner the task taught me then, perception and act almost one. I first become conscious of what the wood looks like as the axe comes around to impact the right spot.

A way that I'm not what I was anymore is how I perceive myself swinging. My body has taken it upon itself to tell me of ways I no longer should bend. A function of age, I suppose, these small protests. To date, more or less, everything still works - I just get reminders that someday it won't. It changes the experience to feel these kinesthetic bulletins come in along with the reports of where the axe head is. Ankle, then knee; back, shoulder, then wrists - thunk goes the axe where it should. It goes on that way until I warm up, with the axe missing if a bulletin particularly startles me.

(I keep expecting to get over being startled by my body, expecting to leave adolescence. For me, adolescence seems to have blended seamlessly into aches and pains, the same melody changing in key. There may have been a few good weeks in the middle there, which I doubtless enjoyed too much to notice.)

Eventually, though, the bluntness of the axe is the only thing throwing me off, and I'm willing to forgive it for that. It's giving me a space and a time when I know I'm doing just what I should, in a way as good or better than most, and that is a rarity I savor. I save up sticks just to get that.

Today I was thrown off as I was tossing my last branch into position. As my eye measured it for three pieces, with cuts here and here, a fluttering appeared, out of place. A butterfly had blundered between my target and my eye, flying as if each movement of wing had a startle built into the motion.

It was orange to gold, and it stayed where it was, for no reason that I could discern. I saw it was beautiful, in its own way. It had browns to it, browns that I'd seen in some eyes. I immediately adopted it for that, and wished it all manner of good. I felt I should stop to admire it.

But I had cuts to make then, here and here, and right then, and a body prepared for that thing. My eyes' focus shifted to the goal that I had, from the loveliness hung in the air, right where the axe would go through.

I think I was right on the rhythm, with those last two cuts that I made. I did look again for the flutter right after, turning the whole way around, but I couldn't spot it. I even looked accusingly at my old friend the axe, but saw nothing of orange or gold or those browns, snagged by its blade in those notches.

I thanked it for that as I put it away, back in the shed where it goes.