All those artisanal, hand-crafted heat candies created in the woods behind our house (the Boombah) have to travel to the wood shed somehow to realize their purpose. Yes, they’re pieces of dead trees, but they’ve been diced up into 16-inch lengths for a reason. I generally cut the trees as soon as possible after they die, so they are usually still green and the pieces of future firewood are heavy. So I stack them in the woods for a year or so to begin the drying process. Like a squirrel with little food caches scattered about, I can usually remember where the piles are. I haul them out on a network of foot trails one load at a time on my shoulders. It’s a great workout. I peck away at it when I feel like it.

 

This year’s major hauling contract involved the monster birch that I wrote about here. It survived a fire on the hillside about 125 years ago. It was dying, so I sped it on its way two summers ago and stacked it up to dry. Wow, was it heavy, and it made up most of a cord.

 

 

 

Now, as summer ends and fall descends, I find myself hustling the last of last year’s piles in and making sure I’ve stacked those trees that were diced up this year. It winds up being a lot of wood shuffling, and at ~4,000 lbs. per cord, I have become a human mule as the cords stack up. But I’ve found that’s good for mind and body. If I should start braying, though…