Giving Thanks One Stick at a Time | Mary’s Farm

Moving to New Hampshire 40 years ago was a combination of rebellion and adventure. At that time, I was a book editor in Philadelphia, but my husband and I were uncomfortable city dwellers. We moved first to Vermont but soon crossed the bridge and found a farmhouse in New Hampshire to rent. In the dirt-floor cellar, an old stove was tucked into the corner. With Herculean effort, we carried the stove up the rickety stairs and set it up in front of the chimney flue. It wasn’t too hard to figure out what we needed to make it work, but we missed one important feature: We pushed it flat up against the wall, which was composed of pressed wallboard. It’s a wonder we didn’t set the place on fire. We made a lot of mistakes. We perfected a method for building a fire: a nest of newspaper (New York Times preferred), plenty of dry pine kindling, then three (no more, no less) sticks of dry hardwood, adjusting the dampers as we went until it was a good, settled blaze that spread heat all the way to our bones. All this came about during the oil embargo of the 1970s, and we liked the idea of outsmarting the sheiks. I see now that we were building not a fire but a life. Our first season of heating, we cut the wood with bow saw and axe, moved it out of the woods and up to the farmhouse in my ’67 VW Beetle (removing the front passenger seat made it into a dandy woods vehicle), and gobbled up 10 cords in a notoriously frigid winter. An uninsulated farmhouse and a stove with open seams helped in that effort. We were young and strong, and our bodies never failed us. The heat, provided by the labor of others, didn’t come on just by flipping a switch, another badge of pride we wore for years. We loved the reward found in the work required, which provided us with a deeply penetrating heat all winter long. We felt there wasn’t anything like it. Eventually we turned in our old leaky stoves for beautifully restored antique cast-iron stoves that provided not only function but form, the cornerstone of our lives. Somehow, this method of heating has followed me throughout, transitioning from cutting our own to buying it cut, split, and delivered. There’s a catch, though. Time moves on, and the aging process sets in. My two husbands have been gone for a number of years. Keeping the house warm has been my challenge and delight throughout these years alone. But this is the part I never saw coming. An illness this past winter severely limited my strength; where carrying a large armload of split wood into the kitchen woodbox had been how I started each day, suddenly this was no longer possible. What once had been my joy became my agony. The woodstoves went cold, and the dread rumble of the basement oil burner became a familiar sound. Recovery was the goal. I once revered a man named Scott Nearing, who, at a late stage in life, built a house of stone. He did it by picking up rocks from his woods, one at a time. From this, he built his house. So I started bringing in the wood, one stick at a time, filling the wood boxes slowly throughout the day. It was a way of building strength and restoring confidence. When I need it come November, I’m hoping my ability to carry wood in by the armload will parallel the rest of my recovery. Edie Clark’s latest book is What There Was Not to Tell: A Story of Love and War. Order your copy, as well as Edie’s other works, at: YankeeMagazine.com/store or edieclark.com