| 010 | Signs of Winter | 2008-11-24 |
One of my favorite household chores is gathering and chopping wood for the fireplace. We are lucky enough to have a few connections with owners of wooded acreage who don’t mind us scavenging dead and down trees. So a few times a year we make the trip to the country for firewood. With chain saws, axes, and loppers we tame the gnarly trees into workable logs and load then into the back of our old Toyota pick-up truck.
Once home we saw and split the logs into workable, burnable sizes. It’s pretty hard work as we break a sweat in freezing temperatures; but it is fun. Woodchopping is a chore with instant gratification. There is no perplexing scheme as to how we end up paying $???.?? for natural gas, fuel oil, or electricity. Instead we provide the labor, chop the wood, and then warm the house with our efforts (and with the help of chemical reactions.)
Of course our aging backs hurt a little the next day, but the thermostat sits at sixty and we know what it takes to heat our house.