I have learned, not through trying, but by experience, to gauge the winter by how full or empty the woodshed is.
There are markers as the shed empties. For the first months I take wood through the big door on the outside of the shed. This is last years wood that I stacked in the summer knowing I would be using it first.
Now last year’s wood is used up.
Yesterday I started using the door in the laundry room that leads to the woodshed. No more going outside to get wood.
Inside the shed, the stacked wood creates a tall box just big enough for the three foot wide door to open into.
Log by log the six foot tall piles of wood get lower and lower as if I’m digging my way out. Today I exposed the full light of the window.
As I stack the wood for the second time since it came to the farm, I silently name the trees whose bark I have come to know. Elm, black Birch, maple, oak…maybe. There are still many I don’t recognize.
It’s the smallest thank you to the trees who were cut to keep us warm through the winter.
