Firewood Philosophizing

You won’t usually find me in a mall, especially among the largest crowds of the year, so I spent some of Black Friday 2021 cutting wood with my Daddy.  I’ve mentioned here before my affinity for a roaring fire and with propane nearly $3.00 per gallon, bringing home a little jag (as we call it around here) of firewood seems like a very worthwhile activity.

I wanted to share a few lines of thought – this endeavor makes for good thinking time.  The saw is too loud to talk over and the woods are always a great place to think.

We were out on the farm where my Great-Grandparents raised their family, including my Grandpa.  I often say I hear their ghosts when I’m on that piece of land.  Actually, I just know so many stories set there that it seems like I can imagine every facet of their daily lives.  And since cutting wood must have taken a lot of their time and energy, it’s not hard to envision that bunch of kids out working a cross-cut saw or axe and then toting home a load of wood.  As I urged my little boy to carry 2 sticks instead of one and to keep working instead of sticking cold hands in his pockets, I wondered if my aunts and uncles complained about the work or the weather.  Did they understand better than my children the absolute necessity of the whole family pulling together?  Was it difficult for Grandpa to get them focused on the work at hand instead of the annoyance of their siblings?

Then there’s that noisy chainsaw.  Like so many products and tools, the post-World War II years saw improvements to a device first developed near the turn of the 20th century.  I don’t know when the first ones came to our mountain, but an awful lot of firewood had been cut and chopped by that time, and Millard Stepp’s children were all grown up.  Our work today would have been much more involved – and much slower – without that gasoline-driven chainsaw!

And then I thought about the trees.  I dislike cutting down trees, mainly because I so greatly enjoy having trees.  It’s easy to feel like we are just haphazardly destroying our forests, a subject I’ve often debated with my Daddy.  His philosophy is that aging or diseased trees need to be harvested before they are wasted.  Clearing out those trees allows young saplings to thrive and perpetuate the forest for many more years.  I have to admit he’s winning me over to his way of thinking.  Today we were working on downed trees.  In fact, they were somewhat past their prime.  They’ll still burn and provide my family warmth and comfort for a little while, plus we needed to clear up the field they were littering.  These were felled by an ice storm and their place in the woods is no doubt already occupied by new sprouts.