Wood Bay #1 under my front deck in Piermont is finally filled with split firewood. Beside it in Bay #2 will be about a half cord of kindling sticks, which are small pieces of wood about three-quarters of an inch thick by 16 or so inches long.
These kindling stick jewels are the main success behind each early-morning fire I have built and ignited seasonally since the early fall of 1978 in our homes, first in Haverhill Corner, then in Piermont.
This was done to chase away the chills of an old and cold house that greeted our family when we ran away from Massachusetts in our Toyota Land Cruiser. We were excited to begin a great life ahead of us in Haverhill Corner, New Hampshire.
This yearàwood supply is exciting. For this coming heating season, Bay #3 holds more split firewood, specifically two-year-old oak, because oak has always been so efficient for my daily fire-building program during the nine-month heating period.
I have been faithfully doing fire building during those cold mornings when we lived in our uninsulated Haverhill home built in 1775, before all those new heating and warming improvements were added to the house after it was 200 or more years old.
Don get me wrong about my comments on our former Haverhill house. It was a jewel among many other homes in the area available for our 1978 purchase. We chose to do life the difficult way and bought an abandoned pioneer farmhouse that had been a stalwart sentinel among the other Early American homes in the neighborhood. Imagine, there it stood all those years, being hit by those brutal storms that moved in from the west since being constructed by the Corliss family, who built two other homes in the Haverhill Corner area, but they built ours first, then went on to put up two more.
I am supposing you remember the early history of our country. If you do, you may recall that when the house we lived in at the time was being built in April 1775, that was the same time that brave patriots and farmers were chucking aside their farming tools, taking up their muskets and hunting guns, and heading south to Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, to learn some military drill and discipline.
These people volunteered to join the fight that had its beginning on Lexington Green and later that spring morning at the Concord Bridge. That was the fateful morning that British Infantry Major John Pitcairn and his troops, just after daylight, stormed across the Lexington Common. Some unknown participant fired, and the war was on.
Here in Piermont this week, the work on our 2025-26 wood pile has been completed. At some point soon, it will begin to be burned up in small daily doses, and eventually, if our supply lasts until late spring, we will have plenty of wood left over. With that, we will begin our 2026-27 woodpile and, once again, do everything we have done for the past 47 years all over again. And so on.
I actually do suffer some remorse at reaching into the beautifully stacked pile of split wood to begin to take it apart, lugging it upstairs, and having it stand by to be torched. Nice looking pieces of wood, clean white ash, red oak with that exquisite grain and distinctive sweet smell, straight-grained maple, another absolutely gorgeous five cordwood harvest taken from our own trees here in Piermont.
We like our trees. We want to nurture them and provide stewardship for them year after year as they grow stately, tall, and handsome. Then some are cut down and eventually sliced into manageable pieces, dried, and then placed into our wood stove, where they are converted into heat and then ashes.
The wood is in, and I am happy, so is Polly, who helped with stacking, with son Spencer and Grandson Alex, who pitched in to make the operation go smoother and faster. To help finish off the log pile, Asa Metcalf came here and sawed it into manageable pieces. We all had our turns to make this yearàwood supply ready when needed.
Next year. What about next year?
More of the same, I hope.

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