Everyone Laughed When Twin Sisters Collected Their Scrap Wood… Until They Opened Their Barn

Chapter 2

The sawmill stood on the north road, a gaunt two-story hulk of a building that had been chewing through the Montana timber for forty years, and its owner, a weathered man named Elmer Guthrie, had a standing problem. Every week, the sawmill hauled away the broken and unusable lumber — the twisted boards, the bark slabs, the offcuts too short or too knotted to sell — and burned it in a smoky pit behind the mill house.

Until the day a lone woman in work clothes walked up to him and asked, without preamble, if she might have the trashwood instead.

Elmer squinted at her like she had asked for the moon. “You want the garbage.”

“If you don’t mind parting with it, Mr. Guthrie.”

“Suit yourself.” He shrugged and spat. “Ain’t good for nothing but a bonfire. Take every splinter of it, for all I care.”