I actually finished the wood for this coming winter about a month ago, but for some reason I waited until today to write a bit about it. People sometimes laugh at how excited I get about our wood stove and splitting wood--and just about everyone older than me admonishes: "you might like it now, but you'll hate it in ten years . . .its dirty and backbreaking work." The presence of a wood stove, or a wood stove hookup, was actually essential to Amanda and I when we started looking at homes to buy. And I love when May rolls around, and the country roads are finally not posted anymore, and my friend Kevin can deliver us our 2 or 3 cords of whatever he has just cut down. I would have to say splitting wood is one of my all time favorite things to do. Its exercise, meditation, and meaningful work all blended in together. This year, we had about three cord left over from last winter, so we only ordered two cord. It was a lot of birch, so it made a terrible mess, as each piece split rendered its bark on the ground next to my chopping block. But at least now I have plenty of kindling in all that bark!
Check out the picture of our little woodshed and the invasive viny weed thing growing all around the wood. It started off like a little plant, and, in the span of three weeks, it has taken over this pile!
I've attached a short essay I wrote a couple of years ago, when we first moved to Maine. I welcome you to check it out. I wrote it at a time when I was very unhappy in our decision to move to Maine--I missed my friends and family, and the apartment we were renting absolutely sucked. Writing sort of provided a therapy for me. One of my favorite things to do in the fall was to stack Lynne and George's firewood. I remember dreaming about having my own house with a wood stove and maple to split. And now I do. . . .
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"Incongruent
By: Jared Goldsmith
August, 2005
The original feeling, the passion and endearing love all came back to me in something as simple as a warm shower. Actually, no. It started coming back to me the day Amanda and I drove through Vassalboro and I began to see there was more around us that I ever thought imaginable—lakes, rivers, meadows, hills, backcountry roads that went deep into the intestines of a New England town. And then, maybe three weeks later, driving with Dad and Barbara down Rt 17, on route to Camden, and then walking around Camden and taking a short harbor cruise around Penobscot Bay, remembering that places this beautiful and awe inspiring—places that honed my character and love of Maine—were less than an hour away.
But I mentioned a shower, original passion, endearing love, and all that. Yesterday, somewhere in between wiping blood off my leg (from a mosquito bite) and wetting me hair (okay its fuzz) it hit me. This is what really started it all. I even said it aloud, something like “Thank God . . .the passion has come back.” What was I doing before the shower? Stacking wood with my wife.
The first time I went to visit Amanda in Mt. Vernon was during the long Christmas break UNH gave us; I started my drive at night, listening to Maine Public Radio, which I had recently discovered and had fallen in love with. I got there around 9 or so, and, as I remember, had to pee so bad by the time I got onto Wings Mills Rd that I drove about a mile past their house so I could go in some guys field (I later found out this was Manley Damron’s apple orchard). I got stuck in the driveway that night; my rear wheels sunk deep into the snow and there was no getting out. I guess Maine had me right from the beginning.
Lynne and George had this beautiful wood stove in their kitchen/dining room. The first place I actually ever REALLY kissed my wife was in front of this stove long after everyone went to bed. Around this stove we got our first picture taken together—Amanda wore gray jogging pants and made a silly face if I remember correctly. It was around this woodstove that we gathered on cold January and February nights, sangria goblet in one hand, gourmet cheese on a cracker in another. George had this way of picking out these obscure cheeses at Hannaford
Keeping a wood stove going is like keeping a relationship going I think. And everything that goes along with it—the splitting of wood, the stacking of it, the seasoning, the continual care needed for the fire to smolder through November until March or even April. It was when I was stacking wood that I realized this. There are literally thousands of things to be doing in Maine on a beautiful Saturday, but here in stillness of the afternoon, there was nothing in the world I would have rather been doing—no river to paddle or mountain to hike or stream to strip—than quietly building walls of wood with my wife—wood that wasn’t even ours to burn, mind you—that would become the sustenance of the harsh Maine winter.
Pieces are in all shapes and sizes—flat ones used for cribbing, angled ones for stacking into other pieces, misshapen ones with knots through the middles that usually no one wants to stack (these end up on the very top just before the tarp is thrown over). But the beauty of it all, I think, is that you take these dynamically different pieces of wood, and you stack them into a wall as neat as you can, and their true beauty resonates in the way the DON’T fully and symmetrically fit together. There are spaces and crags and dips and indentations that allow the wood to season through the summer, into the fall, to ready it for winter; to ensure that when the time is right, these pieces will ignite and pop and burn steadily to warm the soul of a home. I thought about this as we stacked the two cord of wood we did that afternoon, and, as we finished, Amanda and I both laying the last piece on top of the pile, both our hands on it in a celebratory gesture, I felt I started to truly understand the beauty of our relationship.
I can remember going to bed late—well into the “Hearts of Space” program on Maine Public Radio, so it must have been after one—and taking comfort in knowing that George would tend to the fire all through the night, getting up sometimes two or three times to load the stove and let Daisy out to pee. Many times I would hear him get up, as I drifted in and out of consciousness, and other times, getting up at 2 or 3 to go to the bathroom, I could hear in the stillness of the winter house the fire churning and rolling and seething, pushing itself up the chimney as fast as it could. What a mighty fire it was.
During our dating days, Amanda and I would take walks with Daisy, Amanda’s late springer/lab mix, out into the backwoods of Mt. Vernon, into woodlots, sandpits, streams, trails. The trails behind Springpond still remain my most beloved part of Maine. We’d don our snowshoes and mush through 3 feet of snow—there always seemed to be so much snow back there—and Daisy would run a hundred yards ahead of us to “scout” the scene . . .and then run a hundred yards back Amanda and I, to see if we were still coming. Whatever we walked—if we did two miles—Daisy must have done four. But what was truly wonderful was walking up that final stretch of hill and seeing the house and seeing the smoke come out and smelling the fire . . .
Its like an enchanted land, real Maine, without the glamour, just beauty. It seemed so private and like it was made for us. It had a feeling I still cant put my finger on no matter how much I meditate on it. Its amazing how so many of our best memories of Maine have to do with wood stoves and stacking wood. And how the beauty of our life together has always been—and will continue to be—the incongruence in the things we don’t understand and don’t match up—such as the wood we stack, leaving open spaces for air and growth and wind. And, in this incongruence, we find strength that in turn warms the heart of our home, a mighty stove.
