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Cardinal Lady note: Did you count fogs during August with me? Please take a picture of your calendar and send it to regina.butler@journalinc.com. Please include your name and the location you did your observations from. They need to be sent to me by next Friday, September 9, and I will report out all your findings in a future column.

Last week after the showers we got a hint of cool weather blowing on the wind. It made me stop and pause and look up at the leaves. I’m so ready to see the woods change to the yellows, scarlet and bronze. Already the goldenrod is peeking out and a couple of yellow faces are glimmering from my wild coreopsis flowers.

Soon Jon and I will be enjoying a fire crackling in the open fire pit outside with the smell of smoke pleasantly scenting the air.

It would be this time of the year that grandmama and granddaddy would carry us girls to the woods somewhere because someone would have called grandad and told him he needed a tree cut up.

That tree would give valuable heat when the winter winds blew in a short few months. So grandmama would fill a gallon jug full of water with ice floating on the top; and don her brown gloves, and we’d climb in grandads truck and head for the woods.

Grandaddy would crank the chainsaw after working on it some. It would roar to life spewing out gray smoke to match the pipe smoke that was coming from his mouth as he huffed and puffed it out.

Soon the machine would do its work sending oak shavings flying everywhere as he sliced through the tree limbs and cut up the trunk. Sawdust littered the ground as he moved up the tree like he was cutting up butter. Us girls would pick up the smaller sticks and carry them to the back end of the pickup and put them in.

We would take a break from our tiring work and get a sip of that sweet clear water grandmama brought. The ice would rattle pleasantly against the glass wall of the jar as we drank in the coolness.

Granddad would split the bigger logs and grandmama would stack our arms with them and we’d put them in the bed of the pickup as well.

It usually took us until about sunset to get the wood cut and a chill would already be gathering around us. We’d get back to their house and stack the wood outside close to the house so they could gather it in for those wintertime fires.

Grandmama and granddaddy would thank us for coming to help them. It was our pleasure. We always enjoyed spending time in the woods with them.

As we ran home to a warm supper around mama’s table, we’d be grateful that there was plenty of wood to keep grandmama and granddaddy warm, for we knew that we’d always be welcome to come sit by the fire and talk any time we wanted.

As the clock ticked on to the late afternoon this past Friday, I couldn’t help but pause and thank God for the years we had granddaddy. I never thought about the day I’d lose him while he was bigger than life in those woods cutting up trees. But time marched on. That day came on August 26, 2007 in the late afternoon; and yet today memories steal into my heart when the first fresh winds of fall blow.

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