Over the weekend, I had to work on one of my least favorite chores: splitting firewood.

Obviously, anything to do with firewood in this house is difficult, but we’ve also made the decision to continue trying to use wood as a fuel source.

While I will never attempt to cut down a tree, or even ask anyone else to do it for me, Mother Nature has been pretty good about providing a number of naturally fallen trees to help me out. (I think she owed me.) So, once I get them bucked up, usually with the help of a friend or two, I can handle most of the splitting on my own.

Steve always preferred to split wood the old-fashioned way: with lots of elbow grease. Although I love the idea of the built-in workout, I simply don’t have the time, or the strength, to split the amount of wood that I need by hand. Enter the log splitter. While it’s an incredible time and energy saver, it still requires quite a bit of effort to maneuver the logs onto it.

A large oak tree graciously fell over in the driveway a few months ago, and we worked our way down to the stump a few pieces at a time. We were finally down to the last few. A friend had come over and bucked it up for me, so whenever I was driving G’s truck, I would stop and throw a few of the pieces in the back and then split them as time allowed. The last few pieces, however, were just a little too big for me to handle, so I asked G to help me get them loaded onto the truck. He had a busy weekend, some sports commitments, his last weekend of “summer” work, and of course, the college applications with deadlines rapidly approaching, but he granted me a few minutes.

After we finished loading them, he pushed them off the back of the truck near the splitter. He was about to head out on his way when I saw something dawn on him. He came back a few minutes later with the maul and proceeded to split the large pieces into two or three pieces, which I realized would make them much easier for me to handle, and I wouldn’t have to try to maneuver the splitter over to them.

He doesn’t realize it, but those few minutes that it took him to analyze a situation and spend a few moments making my life less of a struggle were so monumentally important to me that I honestly teared up after he finished the job and left for work. It was one of those moments where I felt like maybe I wasn’t messing up the parenting gig.

My kids are not the worst at helping around the house. They all have their own chores and responsibilities, but since Steve died, I have tried to impress upon them, without overwhelming them, that everyone doing just a little bit more to help out would make everyone’s (but mainly mine) lives easier. Things like taking your own laundry to the laundry room, or clearing your own plates from the table, or collecting the upstairs garbage on garbage night, things that take everyone a few seconds, but can add up to minutes or even hours for me.

It gets exhausting continually reminding almost fully formed adults that if they don’t put their lunch box containers in the dishwasher, they’re not going to have clean ones in the morning, which means no lunch. You can only battle someone to launder their sheets weekly, or even biweekly, before you just give up and say, “you’re the one sleeping in them, so what.”

So, to not have to ask for help in the first place, and to have one of them see an opportunity to make my life a little easier, and do it? Well, that was pretty much as good as being a parent gets.

Of course, later when I thanked him for the help and tried to express appreciation for it, he looked at me like I was crazy, and said he just felt like seeing if he could split them with one blow. Sigh. So much for reading into the situation. Of course, G is a lot like Steve was. He doesn’t do things for the recognition, especially things that later seem so obviously having needed to be done, so him shrugging off praise tracked.

At any rate, I just appreciated not having to ask for help. It’s one of the most frustrating aspects of needing help in the first place.

As we head into a time when it is possible that more people, especially ones who are not used to asking for help, may have to break down and do just that, G’s afternoon antics were a good reminder to try to keep my eye out and step up to offer help before someone has to humble themselves and ask for it, or worse, be too proud to speak up at all.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears on Saturdays in the Times News