Wood and Fire
December 2020
Wood in autumn and winter is a very real preoccupation!
It’s all about necessity here and so there is a palpable sense of the seriousness of and respect for the topic--wood gathering tales, storage methods and tips as well as the heating system itself. It is necessity, yes, but it is also tantalizing in that one has a FREE heat source for a massive portion of the year. But you must labour for your stock pile. There is the work of felling the trees, the slow and plodding processing and chopping of the wood, the effort to cajole kids to help (!), further cutting of kindling, the schlepping wood from drying area to area of usage indoors, and then all those slivers…
Socially, visits to the homes of locals include the most haloed zone of the heating centre (the house tours seem to linger at the wood furnace or wood burner with stories of trials and of upgrades). I certainly have a new eye for people’s systems. Enormous structures (far beyond a ‘shed’) house the winter’s wood.
And we have joined in. A while back Morgan discovered the art and craft of the traditional Norwegian wood pile—this is a conical structure with many extremely special and most wonderful benefits of being Scandinavian… For him it also seemed to be about learning something new (there are tomes dedicated to the subject), doing something a little bit different. As we have fresh wood, the split logs get spiralled in to these giant cones. We have three now and anyone who has visited us has surely noted their bulk or even helped to build them.
The rate of usage is surprising! We are nearly through one of the conical beasts and it’s early days of the cold months. Morgan is tending to the fire of our dual burner (wood and electric) wood furnace multiple times a day, and we keep the sweet little Jotul going on work days. There is a significant maintenance and monitoring to all this.
The very large open fireplace in the living room devours wood and really is a lot of work to feed. We often decide to leave it be and won’t have an evening fire. This is the big difference between a week long cabin visit in past winters when we worked to drink in coziness and curated with daily roaring fires (novelty) versus actually living here and discovering the efficiencies of effort (practical). Also wood has a new value and we’d rather use it to heat the living space efficiently.
Besides, fires have been roaring elsewhere … The clean-up-the-yard bonfires have been top priority, and there have been many this autumn. Finally, a long stretch of being here during the burn season allowed us to tackle the clearing and tidying old debris on the land. The kids really held their own as team helpers with this bonfire job and big yard chore—no whining and avoiding but rather delight at the feeling and might of throwing rotten logs and sticks on a towering, sparking fire.
And now for chopping down that most significant tree: the one for our first Christmas at the cabin. Through the autumn, the kids have eyed several potential beauties on our walks as they rehearsed the probability of Christmas away from the city. We four trekked in snow on a sunny afternoon with an ax, choosing ‘the one’ and carrying it home.
And a core family memory for us all.