Hubert Nowak is kneeling on the lawn in his son's garden in Gaden, next to him is a mountain of firewood.
He grabs a log, cradles it briefly in his hands and places it on his forearm.
He feels it exactly, looks for the big end.
Then he fits the piece into a round made of wood, the wider side outwards, the narrow end inwards.
A tower is built log by log, twice the size of Nowak himself. The deliverer dries his firewood in artistically designed log piles.
Gaden / Gegorf - The Nowaks heat with wood in the transition period, there is a Swedish stove in the living room, a 100-year-old grandmother's stove in the kitchen.
They burn ten to 15 stars per heating season.
The 60-year-old father of a son and a daughter fetches the wood himself from the forest.
For 30 years.
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Artful jewelry: Hubert Nowak arranges logs and branches so that their front sides form flowers.
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Nowak, who works part-time in aircraft handling at the airport, loves working with wood.
He has a reading permit that allows him to cut wood in the forest of the Bavarian State Forests.
In close coordination with the forester, he wanders through the agreed parcel, picks up dead wood from the ground or cuts down appropriately marked trees.
He then pays the forester for his harvest.
One of the requirements for the reading license was a chainsaw license, which Nowak obtained many years ago.
“Woodwork is not for everyone, it's hard and dangerous work,” he says.
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Family work: Rosmarie Nowak splits the wood into small pieces.
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When the deliverer returns home from the forest, work begins for his wife Rosmarie.
The 61-year-old splits the wood, making for relatively small and manageable logs.
“So that they fit perfectly in our ovens,” explains her husband.
He then stacks these logs in towers in which the wood - mostly hard ash with a good calorific value - dries for four to six years.
The family used to store their wood, like many others, along their garden fence.
The impetus for the ornate towers of Gaden came from Hubert Nowak's mother ten years ago.
The now 87-year-old Anna Nowak told her son about the timber rents in the form of a round tower that used to be common in the country.
Back then, valuable space was used sparingly and a lot of wood was stored in the round.
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The towers, which are more than three meters high, look like an unusual settlement.
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The elderly woman likes to sit with her son piling up the logs.
Then she makes herself comfortable in her deck chair a few meters further under a tree and watches.
She enjoys the tranquility that Hubert Nowak feels and radiates when he lays wood.
He's in no hurry.
It just takes as long as it takes.
“The work makes me happy and at the same time it is functional.
It's just good when, at the end of a long day, I see what I've done with my hands, ”says the 60-year-old.
"For me this is much more than just stacking wood, it is meditating in a different way."
Hubert Nowak works on a tower for around 30 hours. He manages 50 centimeters in height per day. There are currently three towers on his grown son's property in Gaden, so there is more space than at home in Zusatzorf. On the ground, the rents have a diameter of around 2.50 meters. The largest is 3.30 meters high. How many logs did he use? “I absolutely cannot say that,” says Nowak. “There are maybe seven stars in the big one, six in the smaller ones,” he estimates.
The deliverer has meanwhile mastered the technique of stable stacking inside out.
With the towers that are currently drying, all three of which were built during the pandemic, he has looked for a new challenge: Nowak blossoms are working into the wooden walls.
He arranges logs and pieces of branch so that their front ends form flowers, which he then paints in color later.
“It just looks nice,” says Nowak with satisfaction.
All the more he is happy every time he looks at them, his towers of Gaden with their very special touch.
