We’re cutting wood to burn in the stove for the winter, and there’s a kind of quiet urgency to the task, it seems. It’s getting cold, and windy, and the sun is sinking lower to the south. The whole of this week the temperature will be getting down to freezing at night.

So, when we can, we drive back into the woods and find the best, driest, downed trees and limbs to cut, and we spend about two hours at a time cutting, then call it quits. Just enough time to get a load of new wood and to unload it into the old chicken coop. (Or not unload it, as we did recently: just pack it in, go inside by the fire, and have a hot bowl of soup).

It’s getting cold. I hope the winter months will be warm here, but in this first year of living in the old farm house, we really don’t know yet how things will shake out. The exterior walls of the house, we know, have scant insulation (the house was built back when insulation was not the norm, not the rule), and when it’s 20 degrees outside, I’m not sure if we’ll get the house up to an ambient 65.

We think we’ll be okay, but now it’s a mild 40s-50s during the day — who knows when it’s the middle of February?

Pre-winter doubts now. So, we cut wood when we can.