Sunset, Monday, 23 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va., Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Today, in the rain, I caught myself looking appraisingly at certain long-dead trees hung up and leaning in the woods – trees that could be, at first glance, either a cedar or a pine. That’s because pine is almost always useless for burning in a wood stove, and cedar (in my opinion, not shared by everyone) is fantastic. It was kind of a silly exercise because this was a place where I can’t go wood-cutting, but I think it was a reflex left over from a winter fifteen years ago.

Back then I was renting a circa 1845 farmhouse off Scuffletown Road in Orange County, Virginia, more than a mile from my nearest neighbor, and heating almost exclusively with an old wood stove and wood I was cutting myself. Along one of the fencelines, for about a quarter-mile at the border between a big field and the woods, at least two dozen very large cedars had been blown down, or pushed over, years before, perhaps decades before. All had fallen back into the woods and were completely dry, bleached white-gray like huge wrecks of driftwood. The wood inside was deep red. Heartwood.

I ended up using every last one of the fallen trees, and they were just enough to get me through. For me this was a year of reflection and restoration, and the fragrant burning cedar seemed to ‘smudge’ not just my house but me. I marveled how it burned so cleanly, with almost no ash. This was the period immediately before I began the sunset paintings. Anything I do today I owe in part to the Cedars of Scuffletown.