Dennis Jones

On cold Northeastern Indiana nights as we sit in front of our blazing fireplace, my wife will occasionally ask me why I’m just staring into the fire. I always say, “because I know each one of those sticks of wood personally.”

Every fall I tromp into the woods behind our house, look for downed trees and cut them up for our winter fire wood. Since I have no way to get a vehicle into our woods, I have to manually carry it all out by hand… one chunk at a time… did I mention that our woods slope harshly downhill? That means every single piece of that wood has to be carried UP a hill.

I split everything by hand with a maul and load each individual stick into a trailer to haul back to the house where I stack each of those individual sticks of wood into orderly piles.

This is how I spent my afternoon today… it’s pretty much how I spend most Saturdays in the fall… and when you cut the wood, carry the wood, split the wood, load the wood, unload and stack the wood, carry the wood into the house and light the wood on fire… you pretty much get to know each individual stick of that wood… personally.