I think of winter’s passing not as time, but as firewood. As the weeks progress, the woodpile shrinks; every day’s fire spends a little more of what I set aside through summer. I know that with every piece I put into my wood stove, I am that much closer to thaw. As each log burns, the weight of waiting leaves me, too.
I’ve lived in this 1860s farmhouse tucked into the side of a mountain for more than a decade, and I don’t remember what it was like to live with a thermostat. That luxury is as lost to time and decision as a first love. And just like young romance, I can look back on the simplicity and ease fondly, but without envy. Because as hard as it is, spending my winter carrying heavy logs, splitting rounds, learning the art of starting a blaze with nothing but kindling and a match with numb hands at 4 a.m. – it is always honest.
No matter how hard storms wail outside my farmhouse walls, no matter the power outages and burst pipes – if I keep this fire going, I will have light and warmth. This is the kind of dependency I crave. The kind that must be earned.
I light the first fires in late October, when frost hits true and I pull all the wool sweaters from chests and low drawers, hang them from hooks and the backs of chairs. Tending the fire keeps me home, and friends won’t see much of me until April – unless they walk through my door and let the warmth hit them like a slap on the back from an old friend.
Walking into a house tended by a single hearth stove is a teleportation trick that sends you back to the Beaver’s house in Narnia, or Hogwarts at Christmas, or Bag End when Bilbo has just put the kettle on for tea. It’s a domesticated type of magic, as wholesome as my fat cat sleeping beside the wood stove in a basket of my own sheep’s wool. He’ll remain there on low bake until the equinox, when the even daylight draws him back to alertness.
I can relate.
This life suits me. It suits me to come inside from feeding the animals and set my mittens, sweater, and boots by the stove to dry. It suits me to watch the steam rise from them, adding a feral humidity to the air and some whimsy to the morning. It suits me to add a few more pieces of wood to the box of the wood stove while my mug of coffee warms on top of it. It suits me to have the first light I see each morning come not from a lightbulb, but from the flames. I start a winter’s day with that promise of comfort, embers of purpose. It’s a quiet thrill.
It is by this fire that I roll out my yoga mat and practice breath and flow. It is here that I read novels, biographies, and instruction on the things that excite me. Maybe this will be the spring I find morels by the old orchard! Maybe this will be the summer I find my first trilobite fossil!
There are people who have traveled the world and won Nobel prizes who do not know the peace of uninterrupted months of tending the fire. No holiday travel. No extended company. No pressure to attend any functions from work, or family, or anything that doesn’t baaa or oink or bark. Just a woman, her farm, and her three cords, slowly drifting through the weeks, like a raft heading toward spring.
Three cords are what will carry me through. Three cords will fuel me through the mildest sunlit January melt and the harshest February cold snap, as I pore over seed catalogs and hatchery pamphlets, planning for the abundance of spring life on this farm.
I live my winter by those three cords, and it’s made me better. I understand why our ancestors worshiped the sun. Come summer, I will stretch out beside a river on warm stones, eyes closed, lost in that worship. Anyone who passes by won’t know about the hardship, isolation, sore back, and burst pipes of my coldest months. They’ll just see a woman basking in the heat, as content as a cat in a basket by a fire on a winter’s day.