Word: birching
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...splats against wheel wells. The transmission howls. Linda Ronstadt, a half-ton Chevy pickup with a ton of yellow birch cordwood aboard, has sunk to her rusty frame in a mushy patch of logging road. Linda has four-wheel drive and a lot of heart, but this is a Sargasso of mud, the kind that bogs the wood lot every year after the leafless forest trees stop drinking water and the October rains come. Linda's friend and owner disembarks to consider the problem...
...sound irritatingly smug about the rewards of living in the country, is angry now at the cordwood, the mud, poor mired Linda, and himself. He is spinning wheels, wasting time. Great deeds remain undone, great orthodontist bills are unpaid. Awash with self-doubt, he heaves the birch chunks out to lighten the truck, then jacks, wedges, winches and ponders. At last Linda groans free, and all that remains is to retrieve the half cord of jettisoned birch. There is never a thought of leaving the firewood behind: in darkest February, it will heat the woodsman's ten-room New Hampshire...
...Hampshire, the countrified city man has thrown a day's accumulation of junk mail and the sports section of the Boston Globe, fine sources of energy, into his antique Glenwood woodburning cookstove, along with some dry birch kindling and some twelve-inch splits of coarse grained red oak. He has watched the ancient oven thermometer, as reliable as the day it was made 80 years ago, climb to 425° F. That's a little high. Fiddle with the damper. Now pop in three bread pans full of cracked-wheat dough...
...friends of consumer protection such as Ted Kennedy, Birch Bayh and George McGovern are largely in hiding or otherwise engaged running for election...
There is a real danger that anti-abortion legislation could become increasingly more restrictive. It already discriminates against women in lower economic brackets. The power of the pro-life people should not be underestimated: they have targeted 12 Congressmen for defeat in 1980, among them Morris Udall and Birch Bayh. We need to inform our politicians of their pro-choice constituency and reverse the further tightening of the over-restrictive and discriminatory legislation...