I wood be warm this chilly morn

I have become quite fond of the local seniors' newspaper--eight or twelve pages per issue on newsprint. I also keep my eye out for non-glossy circulars. Yes, I own a new wood stove--how did you know?

They say wood heat warms you three times: when you cut it up, when you stack it up, and when you burn it up. With the temperature dipping down and actual snow lingering on the grass outside from the first snowfall of the season, I am delighted to be able to coax the wood stove into warming us just one time when I get up in the dark of pre-breakfast in a chilly house.

It would be simpler to turn on the oil furnace than to spend time kneeling on the hearth and coaxing the paper-then kindling-then small chunks stack of fuel into consistent flame. But with the oil furnace we have a different kind of heat, and the accompaniment of a deep rumble as if the dwarves under the hill were rolling their darkling wagons toward our basement. The wood stove converses with itself, ticking and crackling and hissing, and we get to watch the flames. I also have come to see heating with oil as lunatic, spendthrift behavior, and want to move away from it as much and as quickly as possible.

Ironically, we bought the wood stove in a year when there is a firewood shortage in Nova Scotia. The province was late in granting licenses to cut wood on crown land, and a few seasoned woodsmen have left off cutting except for their own purposes. On top of that, over the past couple of years there was a well-intentioned but ill-thought-out move to provide energy for the power grid by burning "biomass". I won't go into all the details here, but the result is that a lot of wood that used to be available for residential heating use is now being turned into electricity.

We have enough wood on hand for this winter, although it is far from being as dry as we would have preferred; and next week a nice man will deliver another whole truck load. That wood will warm us for the first time this month, as we stack it in the yard where it can slowly dry out for a year. Then, around next October, it will warm us the second time as we split what needs splitting and smash some of it into kindling (interesting underused back muscles one discovers by using a splitting maul...). And then our winter of 2015-2016 should be warm and cheery in the living room as the stove chuckles and growls its way through the logs we feed it.