This January 6, it’s back to the routine
Scott McLeod photo
It’s Jan. 6, 2025, and my mind was on established routines and rituals. The warm frenzy of the holidays is now behind us. Time now for my wife, Lori, and me to re-establish some of that routine.
It’s a cold 27 degrees with a gusting wind. It was only 4:30 p.m. or thereabouts when l left the office and home is an easy 10- to 12-minute drive. Lori intercepted me by surprise on Ratcliff Cove Road, and I smiled as she gassed her car in behind me. She was coming from Lake Junaluska via Francis Farm Road, myself from downtown Waynesville using Sunnyside and Racoon roads. Her habanero orange Volkswagen bug is easy to spot, as I believe it’s the only one of its kind that calls Haywood County home.
She was behind me as we climbed the mountain and rolled up the driveway. We both zipped coats and donned hats — Lori her prized wool beanie she bought when we visited Scotland’s Orkney Islands a few years ago — as we climbed out of vehicles on this winter afternoon. She went around to her trunk and grabbed a couple of bags of groceries, declining my offer of help.
A big pot of cauliflower soup was on Lori’s mind, and she went to work in the warmth of the kitchen as she had just returned from a walk at Lake Junaluska that she told me had left her feeling the chill from the wind over the lake. My plan was to get a fire going on this cloudy day that had already spit a few flurries earlier in the afternoon. That would provide the chance to spend at least some time outside after a day at my desk.
We had hired tree guys to do some thinning back in late summer. I had them cut what they felled into logs that I could manage with my chainsaw and axe. Their work had left me a huge pile of locust, black cherry and beech (I think). Another massive black cherry tree had fallen on the power line right-of-way that is one border of our property and I had chain-sawed several huge logs from that beast back in the fall and hauled them to the woodshed. My brother-in-law had taken down an old and dying dogwood on my father-in-law’s property in Raleigh last spring, and so I also have a bunch of that wood. Though the logs are small, they are heavy, gnarled and burn very hot.
I had used up almost all my already-split wood over the holidays when my adult children were in town, the ambiance of a fire mainly a mood-setter. We don’t rely on wood for heat; it is an auxiliary, an add-on with our combination woodstove/fireplace.
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Splitting wood is a nostalgic practice for me. In high school, we had no fireplace, but my good friend Kerry’s folks did. Kerry was comfortable with a chainsaw — his father a contractor and builder — and so I learned my way around a chainsaw and we would cut and split for his parents. The time in the woods left an imprint on me. Now, after 30 years with a fireplace, I still look forward to working with trees that end up in our fireplace: cutting trees and logs, hauling them to a place flat enough for splitting, stacking and carrying the wood, building fires. Routines, traditions, things that don’t change, things you can count on (words from a Guy Clark song, I believe).
A winter storm had engulfed the East Coast as I split and carried wood to my porch Monday, and politicians at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., had routinely certified the election results from November 2024 earlier in the day. Unlike four years ago when one of this country’s most enduring and important traditions was disrupted by rioters and hooligans fired up by lies about election fraud, losing candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris on this day presided over her congressional duty that will lead to Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
Individuals, families, institutions and even governments depend on and cling to routines, tradition, good people doing the right thing. Carrying on those traditions and doing things the right way prepares us for the day when things don’t go right, when there’s a disruption, when our routines goes awry. We survived that Jan. 6 four years ago, hopefully the last of its kind.
On this Jan. 6, 2025, the fire was cozy and the cauliflower soup delicious. It began to snow before we went to sleep and I banked up the fire, swung the door shut and adjusted the heater fan to keep the downstairs warm. Holiday traditions have given way to the routines of daily living. As my friend and fellow SMN columnist Garret K. Woodward reminds us every week in his column, “life is beautiful, grasp for it, y’all.”
(Scott McLeod can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
