Keeping the Homefires Burning

Abundance takes a lot of different forms. This fall, though low on dough, my family and I are rolling around in love, hope, renewal and – you won’t guess it – heat. Not only do the heaters in both our cars work, not only do our kitchen stove and oven work (how many people in how many countries would cry with years’ worth of painful struggle for either of these?), but the mother of all heat sources – our woodstove – is sending us into our second winter as warm as we can be.

Since we burned six cords of wood last year, we bought six this year, too. Though the wood was delivered six weeks ago, Lyme disease and new fatherhood (and, for a while, warm weather) have drawn out the stacking into the middle of fall. I’d say there’s about a cord and a half to go. It has been a lot more fun stacking it since the weather got cold; why sweat, if you don’t have to? Meanwhile, we’ve had plenty of nights in the thirties and forties and even a number of days that never got out of the forties, and we’ve kept the house at an average temperature of 76 degrees. Last fall, when we bought the stove, the weather turned cold fast. We ran the stove from the middle of September until the very end of May with only a couple of days off in between. Besides the fact that we were warm in our own home, the stove was a source of visible hope, fire burning in the two glass-fronted chambers (upper and lower) in the flickering, waterlike way it has. My wife said it was the best fall she’d ever had, first simply being comfortable, and second not dreading the increasing sense of inner cold she’d lived with through all her New England winters.

At dusk tonight, there were a few snowflakes falling between raindrops when I drove to the market, and I hoped it would all change to snow so I could walk our daughter outdoors and have her feel snow on her face for the first time. Alas, the falling water has all turned to rain.