Sleepy warmth*

My woodstove is lovely. It’s in steady use from November through March. After 30 minutes of communing with and cajoling the fire-building gods the main house becomes comfortable, and in about an hour the chill will be out of the bedroom but it will still be cool for sleeping.

Lately, we’ve been dealing with snow. Not anything unusual, just one of the winter events. Nonetheless, I’ve become cranky about it. The wind is blowing, and that is causing me fits, because the wind has been filling my woodpile with snow.

Stovewood is delivered to my driveway in May or June as two piles of 16” long pieces, dumped from the truck.    The stovewood must be stacked into tall, rectangular structures using these oddly-shaped building blocks. Some are half-cuts, some are quarter cuts, some are rectangular center cuts (many of which are wider at one end than at the other), some are twisted and have no definable shape. Stacking the stovewood is an all-summer effort for me and many other Vermonters. To some it's an art but that's another story.

I stack the stovewood in back of the house. About half of the wood is stacked further out in the yard, covered with a blue tarp. I use “yard” stovewood until it snows, after which the snowy tarp is too hard to remove (to get the wood) and replace (to cover it up again). Then I begin to take wood from the stack under the roof extension.

(This picture was taken in Feb 2008, when it was snowing every week and there was about 3 feet of snow on the ground). You can see the roof extension, and under half of it is where I stack as much wood as will fit (usually about 1 ½ cords). A serious winter wind causes the snow to drift around behind the house. So I hang two tarps along the edge of the roof extension. When they’re properly secured, they keep almost all the blowing snow off the wood under the roof, keeping the wood basically dry. This is my most important woodstack when there's snow on the ground.

A stack is stabilized by criss-crossing the pieces at each end of the stack. I didn’t finish the woodstacking under the roof until late September and was in a hurry. I noticed that the end closest to the driveway didn’t have level criss-crosses. They were leaning outward a little. But the pieces on top of them seemed pretty solid, so I forged ahead.

About a week later I heard an ominous rumbling and finally looked outside. Sure enough, that end of the woodpile had tumbled down into the garden. It wasn’t a huge disaster, about 20 pieces down and the rest very secure. But the tarp on the driveway end had been ripped down.

I threw another piece of tarp over the end of the woodpile and secured it enough so it wouldn’t blow away. Then the weather turned to rain, work got busy, and I had no time to rehang the tarp. So when it snowed right before Christmas, snow blew into the wood under the roof. And when it started snowing for real while I was away, more snow blew in. On New Year’s Eve Day, with a lot of snow already coming down, I took a ladder outside and rehung the tarp. It’s not great, and there’s still a lot of snow in the woodpile but it’s better than it was.

There is a set of “Rules for being human” (easily googled) which include the following:
YOU WILL LEARN LESSONS and A LESSON IS REPEATED UNTIL LEARNED. A lesson that I have not learned thoroughly is that when there is a problem with the wood-stacking, the offending wood must must be unstacked and restacked. As a result, I’m going to be dealing with damp stovewood for the rest of the winter. (Whine.)

*For a nice poem about the woodstove, see http://avoidmuse.blogspot.com/2008/07/woodstove.html