Last night at my department’s holiday dinner, Carole & I sat across the table from my colleague Chris Robinson, who is also a reader of this blog. Chris imagined, when I wrote the other day about Carole splitting wood, that we use the wood for aesthetic purposes. That we had the occasional bourgeois conflagration as part of our gracious country lifestyle. Let me correct this misapprehension without further delay. We heat our house with wood. Carole splits the bigger chunks, most quarter & half rounds of birch & maple, into smaller pieces that burn hotter. She does this every day in winter. And in the summer she stacks ten cords after the Toomey brothers dump it under the pine trees out front. We do have a furnace in the cellar & a tank of fuel oil so that the house won’t get too cold if we’re away for the whole day, but we make it a point of pride to keep the furnace turned off while we’re at home.
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Two words: pellet stove.
But Shelley, Carole likes splitting wood. Really.
Let me confirm: Carole does like to split wood. She does between five and seven face cords a year. In Joe’s defense, he’s the main cook in the household, and we’ve all read about his growing body of talents for home repair and re-modeling. We had a real nice time last night, and I say this not just because I was sitting across from someone who knows how to wield an axe.
A wife who likes to split wood must be worth her wait in gold — and must have been valuable since time immemorial.
Nancy, my wife would say the same of a husband who likes to cook.
Nah, the comment wasn’t about Carol splitting wood — I like to split wood, and shovel snow myself (excellent exercise, and you feel so good after).
It’s that pellet stoves are environmentally friendly and efficient.
BUT, they lack the beauty of a fire.
Seasoned Maple and Birch are really quite easy to split with a splitting maul (sp?). Of course those pieces with knots in them are not much fun. Locust, on the other hand, is dreadful. It is even dreadful with a hydraulic log splitter.
Last summer a beaver moved in upstream of my house and started taking trees down in preparation for a dam. As far as I can tell, the remnants of Katrina washed away the progress he/she had made. The beaver hung around and half-heartedly wacked a few more trees down and then vanished in February or March- either on his own or with the help of a trapping neighbor- not sure. Anyway, I’ve been gnawing on his logs with my chainsaw. One of his trees was about 20″ in diameter. I have no idea what type of tree it was, but, it is the most humbling experience trying to split it. I swing a standard weight maul HARD. This wood has to be hit in exactly the same place with HARD hits 6 times until it begins to crack. 6 more hits gets the log apart. Rinse and repeat. But, it burns for a long time and throws alot of heat. Rambling.