If I could take you back to summers past to cut and stack firewood with me, I would do it right now. Out of all my chores, I hated doing firewood the most. Insect warfare in the highland desert heat of Idaho stuck me to my core. Some things made me beyond uncomfortable growing up: milk, bees, heat, and slivers were a few of them. Since then, I decided that once I get a husband, I will leave the firewooding to him.
I wasn’t mad about doing hard work. In fact, I enjoyed working out to move my body. Hiking and weight lifting are still my favorites. My grandma often hired me at the store she owned to make firewood bundles. I discovered that there is a real art to creating a geometrically sound, tight bundle. Like Tetris blocks, I arranged the pieces of wood into the bundle slot my Papa had made. The twine had to be strung underneath, pulled tight, and tied in the correct knot. The pieces of string had to connect in the center to create a handle to hold the bundles. I typically received 50 cents per bundle, or $10 an hour. It was my childhood summer job. I remember often dodging wasps, bees, and other insects during that time. My pale ginger self did not like the beating sun.
My childhood home had an electric gas stove, and as I got older, I appreciated it more and more. Once my family and I moved to a family home my cousins had once lived in, we had a wood stove to heat the house. That meant doing firewood. My dad was a logger, along with a lot of family and friends. I grew up around big equipment, even driving up steep mountains 300 feet behind a Thunderbird. As well as moving into a new house, our family expanded as well. My dad remarried to a woman with a son who was a little older than me. We grew up together and were in the same class, we knew each other fairly well.
As a family we went out and got firewood. We went deep into the woods of the Boise National Forest to find a spot to log. My dad and step-mom downed and cut the trees into logs, my step-brother used the wood splitter to chunk the logs into burnable firewood. My sister and I loaded the pieces of wood into the truck, as well as marked the logs at 16 inches with red chalk to be cut. I put music in my ears and drowned out the stress that getting firewood gave me. I despised it. There were always bugs, heat, and a lot of yelling. When I was left to cut or stack by myself or with my sister, it wasn’t so bad. Stacking wood in our shed got hard after the first few cords.
There were times firewood didn’t bring me stress. I recall one drive with my dad when he taught me a lot about trees. He told me about certain butterflies that spread a disease to the trees in Loman, Idaho. There were sections of forest we saw where it was almost impossible to spot a tree that wasn’t infected by the butterfly disease. My dad was also teaching me about types of trees. He showed me the difference between bull pine, western red pine, douglas, lodgepole, red fir, western hemlock, and blue spruce. There were separations in the bark, color, pine needle length, cones, colors, and location of trees that guided one to know what it was. It was important to him to know what trees to cut down, what wood is best to burn, and what trees are to be left to grow.
When I describe my family to people who don’t know much about my upbringing, I often tell them about a time when I was stacking firewood. My sister and I were left outside to finish stacking two cords of wood into our shed. We finally finished and went inside to play. It was summer, and the last thing we wanted to do was more chores. It was maybe 45 minutes later that I heard a thud and crash outside. My parents came to tell my sister and I that we did such a bad job stacking the wood that both cords fell in the tightly packed shed. My sister and I reluctantly went out that evening and restacked all the wood. It didn’t fall the last time we were in the shed or the second time. We were sad and angry that our parents thought we were so ignorant or stupid, as if we had forgotten how to do something that was in our DNA. We grew up in the woods, were raised by a logger, last name even as earthy as our childhood, yet somehow, we failed to stack wood. Out of energy and patience, our second stacking was not as organized as the first. But magically, that second stack of wood never fell like the first.
It was the next day or so I was upstairs playing video games with my step-brother when he felt the urge to confess. He told me it was the parents fault that the wood we stacked had fallen. Our step-mom told him to grab the pitchfork and drag the pieces of wood down, loudly and in a way we would think it was our fault and not an outside source. Of course I don’t know exactly what she said to my brother to have him do that, but I went outside the next morning and there was the pitchfork, next to the shed when it had not been there the first time we were stacking wood. Supposedly my step-mom did it to teach my sister and I a lesson. That day I found out, I did learn something. I am very alone, and have to get out.
I get slack from people when I say I don’t like doing firewood; they assume I am lazy or too girly. I give them small details, reasons I don’t like doing it. But the truth is, I don’t like doing firewood with my family. Warmth in the winter is not worth the yelling insults while logging, the sunburns, running from wasps, and being lied to by my parents. That chore made me feel worthless, tired, and full of stress. I have nothing against firewood. I love the smell that stays on my hoodie after a bonfire, I love going into the mountains to find a place to log. I love searching for different types of trees and the bugs or fungi that live on them. Some of my best memories were made at bonfires, yet some of the worst were made getting the wood.
Homesteading Honey 