Wood Choppers Ball

It is chilly this evening. The Shenandoah Valley has had snow flurries off and on all day. The wood stove is fired up and the temperature inside is cozy, while outside it is a damp thirty-three degrees f.

It is a cliché to say wood is a fuel that heats you twice – once when you burn it, and previously when you cut it. In my case, it heats three times, the third being when I split it. The wood that lies piled in three rows outside the yard is the culmination of summer and fall work cutting wind fallen trees and November and December splitting. I enjoy the work, taken in small dozes. I especially enjoy hefting the splitting mall above my head and with a grunt and groan, whacking the pieces that are too wide for the wood stove. There is a satisfaction for an old man to be able to hoist the mall and split the wood with a crisp shommp as the edge of the mall cleaves into grain of the wood. The pride swells when a log splits with a single smash.

We don’t heat primarily with wood, but use it as a backup to the propane/hot water fired furnace. Most evenings the main heat is off and the wood stove cranking away, but the fire will go out during the night and the furnace is timed to kick in for the morning warm up. If our schedules take us out of the house during the evenings, we’ll let the furnace do all the work. I can’t say that wood burning is money saving when calculating the expense of gas, oil and sharpened blades for the chainsaw, versus the cost of running propane to the water heater that would be heating the hot water anyway. I should do a cost analysis to see if I’m really saving any money.

But money is not the real reason we burn wood. Our wood stove has a glass front so I can turn out the lights and watch the fire dance as it consumes the logs. As the trees that provide the logs have been blown down in the wind, it is a way to maintain the looks and function of the farm. Robert Frost wrote a poem about an old woodpile found on a walk in his woods – the phrase that sticks in my mind is “the slow burning of decay”. I do leave a few standing dead trees on our property for the benefit of the woodpeckers, but if the trees that have been knocked over by the wind are going to burn slowly anyway, I’ll burn them fast and be warm thrice over.