Splitting Wood

Next to the Friday before opening day of deer season, last Wednesday was my favorite day of the year. I made firewood.

I love splitting firewood. Real men use an ax, of course. I rent a hydraulic splitter from the hardware store down in Conover. But still, it takes a whole day to split and stack about a cord and a half of wood — a cord being four feet tall by eight feet wide by four feet deep for those of you ungrizzled urbanites who didn’t know that.

With that, plus what was left over from last season, we should have enough for the winter of 2025 – 2026. For the winter after next, I have my eye on some nice downed maple trees across the road in the Ottawa National Forest.

But almost all of this next season’s fires will be laid from two big white birch trees cut down last summer from the slope between our cabin and the lake. My wife notes that trees between a cabin and a lake obstruct the view between the cabin and the lake. I note that, one, it is a forest, and two, what obstructs the view of the lake from the cabin also obscures the view from the lake to the cabin.

The water around our dock is popular among anglers because it’s good habitat for pan fish. I don’t want guys looking up from their rods and saying stuff like. “Ya know, Al, I thought this guy would’ve stained that cabin last season. Now, with all his trees down, I can see I was right. When’s he gonna get around to it?” Comments like that from a guy who is fishing are just way out of line and I don’t want to hear it. Plus, I am just anti-social. Dianne is not.

We resolved this the way we come to agreement on everything. Each side states their views by marshaling their evidence and making calm and rational arguments. Then we do what Dianne wants. It works for us.

So now, because she was right yet again, I have a woodshed almost full of pretty (in both senses of the word) dry white birch which, after a summer in the sun, will be very dry by the time the first fire is called up, probably in early October. Although, with last year’s supply still in the pipeline, I don’t expect to touch the birch until about Christmas time.

Then I’ll pour myself a brandy manhattan, sit down in my old worn red leather chair, invite my dog to curl up on my lap, lay a book on the dog’s back and sip my cocktail in front of a roaring fire of dry birch, split and stacked by me on a cool day back in early May and made possible by the superior judgement and warmer feelings toward humanity of the woman I married.