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NATURAL THANKS

Yesterday we used the woodstove for the first time this year! Until then layering and sweaters had been enough to keep us warm (best to keep the body's own furnaces fine tuned as well), but a big thick white slab of pure Siberian weather slid south, and today the mountains are like sugarloaves in a very big clear blue bakery window. Perfect day for the task the weather itself makes essential: firewooding. Out there today in the crispness, splitting and smalling slabs of oak, selecting some bucked cedar for quick heat, getting the firewood place ready just outside the door before the snow comes and buries everything, making fine tuning impossible. Even after all these years, it still delights me to see a fire in the stove; it still amazes me here at night, with such cold outside, how warm just one single wood stove can be, how well it can heat a house. We have a loft upstairs, where I sit now inputting this, and not long before bed I'll just open the doors to the bedrooms and they'll all get nice and warm real fast, just from that fire down in the living room, burning the wood I cut last year. There is a deep reward in such cycles, so many of which we have put by the wayside in our march forward, cycles involving nature and natural exercise, natural thanks for warmth fully earned and appreciated many times over.