How Much Wood .....?

When we moved into this farm house, there were two furnaces. A traditional propane burning furnace, and a wood stove. At first, I was not sold on the whole wood burning idea - too much pollution, too much deforestation, too much work to get the wood. I felt that the propane furnace was the better way to go and actually visualized the basement without the monster of a wood burning stove in the way - "wow! think of all the space!" Not that I really had any idea what to do with that space in a 100 year old basement in a farm house. Just in case you have never been in an old farmhouse basement, let me tell you, they are scary, dark, musty, damp places that not even mice like to frequent. And this one was no different. Imagine a scene from Misery and you will have some idea of what the basement was like. But I digress. So, the first year in the house I don't think that we used the stove once. The chimney wasn't lined with anything which basically meant that all the smoke and heat was just behind the bricks and plaster in the house. A chimney fire would have been the end of us. The propane heater kept us from freezing to death, but it was a cold winter. That, combined with the fact that each room only had two 60 watt light bulbs in wall sconces led to some serious seasonal affective disorder. The second year, we had a few fires in the wood stove, mainly as an experiment to see if the chimney would hold. It did and the house took on a very warm cosy feel. We were sold! Not to mention that the prices of fuel oil and propane were heading ever upward. By year three, we were ready to line the chimney and see what it would really do for us. Keith risked life and limb climbing up on the three storey house to place a liner in the chimney and then purchased the brushes and needed equipment to clean it out yearly. But so much time and money was put into that work, that there was very little dry wood accumulated to actually burn that first year. Keith did put a cap on the chimney, however, to keep the birds out. This seemed like a great idea until I was lighting a fire the weekend he was away and a mostly burned up piece of cardboard floated up and blocked the grate. The house filled with smoke and we nearly froze to death as I had to open up all the windows so that we could breathe. I, of course, thought it was due to the wet wood I was trying to burn, but no amount of hot kindling stick fires could entice the fire to stop smoking up the house. I resorted back to the propane to save our lungs and only after Keith came home and braved the roof in sub zero temperatures did we figure out what had happened. There is no longer a grate at the top of the chimney and now there are a number of ill fated birds that remove themselves from the gene pool each year. Darwin's theories are alive and well. Year five on the farm led Keith on a mission for dry wood. Ice storms that took down huge numbers of trees were his best friend and he soon found that there was always plenty of neighbors with trees that needed splitting and hauling away. Little by little, the piles of wood grew, but the problem still remained that the wood needed to be dry. The first year was the hardest because he essentially had to cut and haul two year's worth of wood so that one could dry for a year. And then there is the problem of where to put it. Piles of wood emerged and seem to get rearranged every so often, but then I am not the one doing all the moving, so I try to stay quiet and avoid confrontation where the wood is concerned. My kids, however, seem to have found their purpose (at least as far as Keith is concerned) There is always wood to be hauled, or split, or cut, or moved. This job can keep him (and the kids) busy for hours and it is the perfect deterrent to misbehavior on a windy day in January, "Settle down right now or I will send you out to get a load of wood!" ....I usually don't see or hear from the kids for the rest of the day. Simon seems to have taken to the wood thing, however. He happily joins Keith on the tree finding missions and they will send hours cutting up logs to haul home. On a recent adventure in a neighbor's pasture, Keith had to dodge a charging bull while Simon leaped over the fence to avoid being gored with a horn. Nobody ever said harvesting wood was without it's risks. There have been any number of close calls. The sutures placed in a hand that inadvertently was in the way of the axe, the shins and toes that have been crushed. I know for a fact that if you loose a toe-nail it takes exactly 1 year to grow a new one. I know this because at Christmas one year, in the middle of the night while fueling the fire, I dropped a huge log on my big toe and proceeded to, through the next several weeks, watch the nail change from red to black and then fall off completely. By Christmas the next year, the new toe nail was finally long enough to have to trim. After finally getting enough wood to last through a winter, the next consideration was how to split it all. Keith had a few wedges that were procured in the chopping down of a huge maple tree, these he used for the first season of wood splitting. This was an agonizing process to watch. Keith is a tall, strong, wiry guy, but this was still agonizing to watch. The splitting maul was used to split smaller pieces and then wedges were used to split the larger ones. This was all well and good as long as Keith was home to do the splitting. I remember one very cold February when he was gone for a week - I don't remember now why he was gone, but it was probably to get away from his wife who was whining about being perpetually cold all the time. I was left to fuel the fire on my own and did manage to split a fair number of logs, but I don't think I could raise my arms by the end of the week. They say that splitting wood warms you twice - once when you split it and once again when you burn it - I find that to be very true. I have a feeling that if everyone in the country were to have to split wood to stay warm, there would be far less obesity problems in the world. But enough with the wedges. I just couldn't watch it anymore. So, for Christmas on the second year of burning wood, I gave Keith a hydraulic splitter - one that you have to work the handles to pump the hydraulic pump toward the wedge and thereby split the wood. I liked it - still required some work, but wasn't as back breaking as the other method. I could actually help with the splitting chores now and it got us through the winter. Keith, wasn't as sold - too wimpy for him. He has a love of tools - big tools - and his eye was on a motorized splitter which somehow seemed to materialize somehow - spirited to the farm as so many other tools have been before it. Again, I try to avoid getting between the man and his tools if possible. So now, we have the ultimate splitter. Keith claims to have an unhealthy relationship with this particular tool and I have to agree with him. He loaned it out to some friends of ours last winter and then it got snowed on. I caught him staring out the window with a distinctly bereft look on his face, worried that his splitter was alone and uncovered in the storm. But it does the trick. Many a night I will hear him and Simon outside splitting wood late into the evening and they come back into the house in good spirits and with a sense of camaraderie produced from tackling the job of felling, splitting and stacking a winter's worth of wood. The biggest drawback, is the hauling of the wood from the pile to the house. After a foot or more of snow, this gets to be an odious chore. The wheelbarrow works in the fall and spring, but the majority of the wood needs to be brought up when the weather is always at its worst. A nightly chore for the kids to go get a load in the sled and then bring it up and unload it, I feel, is a good one, but the guilt I feel watching them outside on the porch dropping the logs one by one down through the porch to the specially build window opening into the basement, is incredible so there are many loads that I haul and unload either by myself or with them and there are many loads that Keith hauls and unloads by himself. My favorite is a kid that is looking to earn either more time on the computer or some money to buy something that they want - two loads of wood hauled and unloaded will earn a kid 20 more minutes of computer time or $2 extra of allowance (personally, the allowance is the better way to go, but then I am not a kids anxious to play Runescape online.) All in all, I love the fire. I have mastered starting a roaring fire with one match (or less if you have good embers). I collect all the small twigs in the spring and we save those in empty feed bags in the shed so they are dry and hot for starting fires in the winter. The entire house becomes warm with wood heat - the floors, the walls, the attic where the girls now have their rooms. Most nights it is too hot to go to bed with covers and by morning you are comfortably snug in a cool house. The smell of the wood burning outside is a very comforting smell - very similar to the feeling you get sitting around a campfire, there is something about fire that is very primordial and part of what sets us apart as a species. The burning of wood for fuel does have its drawbacks - it does pollute, but then again, so does oil as evidenced by the recent spill in the Gulf. The thing that draws me in the most is that it is renewable....and it really does grow on trees! We do our best at maintaining a balance - most of the wood that we take is dead fall or dying trees and we plant several trees each year to replace the ones that we have used. I see trees that get up rooted to make ways for houses or roads - huge stacks of it on the side of the road and I think, "What a waste!" knowing how many homes could be heated with that fuel. I think that our dependence on fossil fuels needs to come to an end - and will eventually, whether we want it to or not, but it is ridiculous knowing that there are other ways to produce electricity and heat that are not employed simply because they are too time consuming or strenuous to do. What do we need all this extra time to do? Watch T.V.? Not talk to one another? Catch up on Facebook with people we really don't ever see anyway? The modern life has given us the greatest gifts of ease and time.....the modern life has also given us the greatest curse as well - ease and time....time to sit and do nothing, ease to become complacent and greedy. There is something to the idea that splitting wood warms you twice, but it warms another way as well - I feel as though my kids, grumbling and complaining as they sometimes do will know where the warmth comes from - it comes from something that we grow and nurture and then cut and harvest, split, haul and burn and then lovingly plant again for another generation that we may never see. The winter at our house can be measured by the loads of wood, as the piles of split logs slowly shrink in size you know you must be getting closer to Spring and winter will eventually loose its death grip on the world. Just about the time that we despair of ever being free from the wood hauling chores, the tulips pop up, the windows come open and the thoughts of hauling wood disappear for an entire season.....unless you are my husband in which case you gaze longingly upon your splitter and you shine it up for another tree splitting season.