We’re gearing up for winter here and got a load of firewood.\u00a0 I was chuckling as I was helping to stack it that I was experiencing some flashbacks.<\/p>\n
I recall the energy crunch of the 1970s pretty clearly even though I was a little kid.\u00a0 My parents built a house with electric heat and after a $400 heating bill (remember this was the 1970s.\u00a0 The dollar was larger), Daddy got a wood stove.<\/p>\n
We didn’t buy firewood.\u00a0 There was a lot of building going on back then, and we’d follow behind loggers clearing land to get the laps — tops of the trees that were too narrow to be useful in logging, but certainly big enough to burn.\u00a0 At the time, it was free for the taking. We’d just take our station wagon out into the woods, Daddy with his chainsaw and Mom, my brother and I would work together to get the logs into the back of Clyde (We named the station wagon after the camel in the song Ahab the Arab).\u00a0 God, did my brother and I whine and complain about those trips.\u00a0 We lived in a neighborhood where most of the Daddies had government jobs just like ours did.\u00a0 We were the only kids we knew of that were hauling wood and we were indignant.\u00a0 Dad would usually retort, “You like going to the beach and Disney World, don’t you?\u00a0 This is how we can afford it!”\u00a0 That didn’t silence us nearly as well as it should have.\u00a0 Why I never internalized that I was doing real work that contributed to those things, I do not know.\u00a0 If I had, I’d’ve been as proud of it as any of the other things I bought with money I’d earned myself, I think.\u00a0\u00a0 Obviously my parents looked at it that way, or Daddy wouldn’t have made such a retort in a moment of irritation.<\/p>\n
Daddy would always try to get logs less than nine inches in diameter.\u00a0\u00a0 That would fit into the stove and he wouldn’t have to split much wood.\u00a0\u00a0 We didn’t have powered log splitter, but used a modified heavy axe with two levers on either side called a Chopper<\/a>.\u00a0 There’s a video at the site that shows how it works. It’s quite clever.\u00a0 The site says it has been around since 1977, so we must have bought one of the the first ones made.\u00a0 I was in my mid-teens before I was strong enough to be able to split a log using it, and was pretty stoked when I managed it.<\/p>\n After the wood was cut and split, my brother and I stacked it.\u00a0 Yes, there was whining and complaining about this, too.\u00a0 Not only did we have<\/em> to stack wood, it had to be stacked neat and pretty<\/em>.\u00a0 Yes, yes, a neatly-stacked woodpile is safer and more stable.\u00a0 My brother and I were convinced that it was more because of my mother’s sense of aesthetics.<\/p>\n We did not bring the wood through a door into the house, tracking dirt and stuff everywhere.\u00a0 Nope, not in my mother’s house!\u00a0 The wood stove was in the laundry room in the basement where Daddy had rigged a vent system with a thermostat and air blower to send warm air around the rest of the house.\u00a0 The room in the basement had a window.\u00a0 When the woodbox needed filling, my brother or I (or more likely both if we were being especial pains in the ass) went outside after dinner to push logs through the window to either Mom or Daddy to stack and fill the woodbox.\u00a0 As we got old enough to stack the wood well downstairs, we’d usually fight over who got to stay inside and stack the wood that was passed through that window.<\/p>\n When I started dating, it was not unusual for boyfriends to be helping with this…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We’re gearing up for winter here and got a load of firewood.\u00a0 I was chuckling as I was helping to stack it that I was experiencing some flashbacks. I recall the energy crunch of the 1970s pretty clearly even though I was a little kid.\u00a0 My parents built a house with electric heat and after … <\/p>\n