Tom McLaughlin: Getting the wood in

There was a time I thought I’d be cutting my firewood every year until I was an old man. It was hard work, and by the time I was done sometime in the fall there were no extra pounds on me. Then would come holidays with all the food, and the extra pounds would gradually return until summer rolled around again and I’d be back in the woods. I had a Ford 8N farm tractor that was older than I was, and I used it to pull trees out of the family wood lot in West Lovell, Maine. Then I cut it to 4-foot lengths to haul home to work it up after school each day. My wife and kids all helped get it into the woodshed before snowfall.

It was a labor-intensive and time-consuming process, but it was a whole-family effort and everyone enjoyed sitting around the living-room wood stove through the long winter. You might say we bonded over firewood. The work was all mine until the wood was all cut to stove length. The family helped while I was splitting it, pulling the cloven pieces from each side of the chopping block and carrying them to the woodshed. I worked as a school district administrator during the first couple of years, a job from which I derived little satisfaction. The straightforward task of getting firewood from stump to stove was a welcome relief from the nebulous duties of that job.