The Myth of my Mountain Time

I have firewood. It got delivered yesterday while I was at work, and then we got snow. So I had to drive home (slowly) and immediately start the stacking. The hardest part was getting the wheelbarrow around the garage in a couple inches of slush, and then not falling down as I moved between the barrow and the stacks. I mentioned it was snowing, right? And once that was done I had dinner and stared mindlessly at the television until it stopped snowing, then went out and shoveled the driveway at around 9:30ish. So I slept well last night, but I'm sore and the roads are still some icy. We're supposed to get some good sun today, so hopefully that'll melt off.

Why do I get firewood? I have a perfectly functional furnace, with a gas line that feeds my oven and power lines that provide light and radiant heat. I'll tell you. It feels natural. For a time my parents heated our house with fire, and I remember getting up early and shoving wood into the tiny wood stove in the family room, stoking it until the room got warm. I think it was part of the fantasy my dad maintained about the woods, this unreal phantasm of cold mornings and kindling and splitting wood with an old black ax, the head worn shiny by countless strokes through bark and grain. And the upshot of his fantasy is that I did live that life, I split wood and stacked it and hauled it down deerpaths. Driving around after windstorms looking for the wood we'd burn in two years, collecting piles of kindling and clearing the ashes into a hod, banging creosote out of the stove pipe and warming the flue with a twist of newspaper.

Anyway. It feels natural. And I love the way wood burns. And when you've stacked a cord of wood in blowing snow, you've actually accomplished something of weight and volume and time.