Four pieces of oak, then you write your name

The oak is under the tarp by the path. Take four pieces. Then write your name in Talk, on the oak thread, not in a note that falls behind a crate. When the stack is gone I will say it is gone. Until then it is a stack, not a suggestion that the hall has become a woodyard.

Willem took four for a shelf on the east window and left the tarp weighted, which is the whole of good manners in one gesture. Bas took four for a shelf on the opposite window. I have asked them to discover which of them now owns a spare shelf, and not to solve it by building a third. The hall is not short of flat surfaces. It is short of people who look before they cut.

Do not tidy the stack into the long room. I have said this in enough places that it is starting to sound like a proverb. The long room is for sitting and for the Friday twenty minutes. Farms do not go there. Oak does not go there. Muddy boots do not go there. If the evening starts to stutter because someone has built a cathedral of chests, the cathedral comes down. We did this once, in June. The person is still here. That is the tone I am aiming for.

Cabbage is Lena's business and the photograph of hands in the dirt is not an invitation to harvest the south row. Dinner cabbage is the bed with the tall leaves. Seed is the short stakes. If you cannot tell them apart, you are not hungry enough to risk it. Ask.