Wood, With a Gift for Burning

Art and firelight at the end of the year ...

Scrapwood burning in our cabin firepit

Although it’s been unseasonably warm this December, most mornings still start with me building a fire in the woodstove.

While I should fill the wood box at the end of the day so it’ll be dry by morning, most of the time I forget until we return from our pre-breakfast dog walk, and so I clomp through the house in my boots, arms full of often-snowy firewood from the stack by the back door.

Heating with wood is the opposite of the “seamless” lifestyle the tech gurus seem to want for us all. Heating with wood means remembering to call Nate, my wood guy, in August, before it starts getting cold, to make sure I’m on his list. Nate does tree removal for the city, among other clients, and so this firewood I’m burning is what’s left of the ash trees the city is removing, although some of it is box elder, and a little bit is cottonwood. I pay Nate extra for the hardwoods, and they’re worth it.

Nate hauls cut trees back to his place, and in the late summer, cuts and splits it to lengths that will fit in my firebox, and we both have a tiny adventure getting his truck backed into the tight space between the garage and the apple tree (trees he also trims for me in winter, our ongoing battle against the fireblight that’s endemic all over town). Finally, with a rumble, two cords of wood spill out, and I have a couple of afternoons ahead of me of stacking wood where it’s both out of the way, and accessible if winter gets snowy.

There are two woodpiles. One along the gate to the alley, which looks nice, gives me a little privacy, and provides a bit of a windbreak. Oh, and Harriet likes to stand up there and greet us when we come home in the morning:

Summer kitty keeping an eye on the alley

This means that a couple of times a winter, I have to move wood from the back pile to the one by the backdoor. Again, the opposite of seamless. An afternoon with the wheelbarrow, usually a podcast on the headphones, back and forth, back and forth.

I don’t have an HVAC system. I don’t have a furnace. This seems startling to people when they find out. “But you live in Montana! It’s cold there!” My house is small — about 1200 feet with a half-basement, and between the woodstove and the infrared electric heaters up along the ceiling, it’s perfectly fine in here. “But how?! You don’t have a furnace!?”

The key is insulation. I have a LOT of insulation. This is a small house. Spot heat works just fine. That you don’t need an HVAC system feels like one of those anachronistic secrets you’d see on a YouTube video. TEN THINGS YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT HEATING YOUR HOUSE!

What do we really need? As we hurtle into a new year, maybe that’s a thing to consider. What do we need? For me, what I need gets smaller and smaller every year. The lovely partner, the animals, the house I paid off and that’s pretty much fixed up, the car I’d love to not need. It’s been my goal the whole time I’ve had this house, to get the systems set up, to keep the needs as close to local as possible, to get to a point where I don’t need much money, so I can “retire” and go back to writing.

The good news is! Almost there! This is probably my last year of full time work. Everything is paid off. I’m within shooting distance of the round number I set for myself for retirement.

And so — I’m going to be sunsetting the LivingSmall blog project. It’s been 20 years!? I did what I set out to do … and that’s very exciting.

So I’ll be starting a new project, and newsletter. I’m really excited about it. The whole Substack/Nazi thing has been a drag, so I think I’ll be going back to self-hosting, and sending you all newsletters, but I’ll also cross-post over here. Really, you all shouldn’t notice much change. Once I have all the ducks in a row I’ll send out a formal announcement. But I’m really excited about it. I’m looking forward to going deeper into a lot of the issues that have fueled LivingSmall, and to giving you all a peek into the essay project I’ve been working on.

So, silver linings. Not entirely seamless, I’m sure we’ll have some hiccups, but it’ll be a good thing once we’ve got it organized.