Thoughts about wood

A recent blog post got me thinking about how many times I touch a piece of wood that’s been cut down on my property. It’s infinitely simpler to just have a couple cords of wood delivered to the house but when it’s your wood, it gets complicated.

My wood and I have a rather close relationship and though I can’t really remember any of the thousands of individual pieces of wood I’ve put in the woodstove, one thing is clear – wood consumes a lot of time.

The life-cycle of a piece of wood at the Bar B: I figure with all the wood on my property I touch a piece of wood an average of 14 times. When it’s cut down, when it’s blocked, when it gets moved to where it’s split, to putting it in the splitter, to taking it out of the splitter and put in the wood pile, when it gets taken off the pile and put in my wood carrier, when it gets stacked inside, when it gets put into the woodstove, when it gets moved inside the fire, when I scoop out the ashes and when I put them in the ash bucket and when I either dump the ashes on the compost pile or put them in the trash.

To quote a friend: “You never know how much goes into building a fire until you have to make a fire.”