After this season’s big snows, after the big winds, the Scottish lanes of Garrett Park, Maryland (all of its streets have names taken from locations in Sir Walter Scott novels) were strewn with leaves and limbs. Up and down my street, Rokeby Avenue, thick branches from the town’s lowering oaks and maples lay in piles fashioned by walkers who kicked things aside as they walked.

The whole town of Garrett Park is an arboretum. We’re known for enormously high old trees that mass so closely it’s sometimes hard to see the sky at all. If you want to catch a meteor shower or a lunar eclipse or a rare northern lights show, you’ve got to sidle out of the town’s embrace.

During the evening of the thundersnow, I stood at my front door and heard the woody chorus of the town trees creaking, cracking, and then letting fall their old arms. I heard the stalwart firs and beeches begin to fail, piece by piece, under the weight of snow. Some of the branches fell into my front yard, breaking off from their trunks with a shower of loosened snow, then drifting to the ground in a cloud.

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By the time the weather cleared, my small house, surrounded by about an acre of land, looked like a lumberyard. Some logs from the last tree we had removed (trees are always encroaching on our house, or on the above-ground wires in front of it) still lay scattered in the woods, waiting to burn in our fireplace. They’ve been there long enough to spawn giant puffballs.

There was the routine limbfall as well, the almost-daily drop of twigs and branches onto our back deck and down the stretch of backyard and woods. And now another layer of – call it ground canopy – established itself: bits of hollies, sharp and palm-like; long, just-budding dogwood offshoots; beautiful soft viburnum outgrowth with glossy green-gray leaves; dull thin hollow honeysuckle sticks.

There were immovably heavy black limbs mottled with olive starbusts. They showed, where they’d broken off, the wood’s pale yellow heart. Some had hollows for owls and squirrels, and sub branches that looked like deer antlers. On foggy days and nights, this elaborate fallenness everywhere lent an air of lassitude, a sort of cosmic letting go, to the small world of my town.

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But now there was the business of breaking up the wood and dragging it into the little forest next to our property. This wasn’t my daily routine of walking the dog about the place and bending every now and then to pick up a twig. For this I’d need the hatchet I’d inherited from my mother, a serious gardener and thirty-year resident of the town (I grew up in Garrett Park). I’d need the green tight-fitting garden gloves I’d bought to protect my hands from the prickly bushes edging our house. I’d need a bit of upper body strength.

The deer who live at the top of our hill watched as I hurled hatcheted pieces of timber into the woods. When I stopped to stretch, I marveled at the sky: wild traceries of limbs, all of them still shivering in the wind.

I made note of the most fragile among them, the dead ones ready to topple in the next storm. When I tired of hauling trees into the woods, I simply made piles of the branches. They got higher and higher, until they looked like platforms for a saint’s immolation.

The piles are still out there; very slowly, I’m digging out from the woodstorm.

“Don’t toss them all away!” said my friend Karyna to me the other night. She said she’s always wanted to try wood sculpting. “I’m coming over to see your beautiful wood.”