From Destruction to Fuel to Warmth to Comfort

Vern had some "help" today :) The last of the November 17th windstorm storm destruction is now cut and drying in our log pile. We've got several friends with woodstoves who might receive some warmth and comfort from these old logs which were violently toppled. My favorite environmentalist writer, Aldo Leopold, wrote:  "There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm.  One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery and the other is that heat comes from the furnace.  To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue.  To avoid the second, lay a split of good oak on the andirons...and let it warm shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside.  If one has cut, split, and piled his own good oak and let the mind work the while, much will be remembered about where heat comes from and with a wealth of detail denied to those who spent the weekend in town astride a radiator."

I wrote a post about the biggest old pine last year - 129 years old. Put on it's first ring of growth in 1886 back when Grover Cleveland, Apache leader Geronimo, and Sigmund Freud were around and the same year someone named Karl Benz patented the world's first automobile in Mannheim, Germany.

We are just a tiny part of this big picture called our world, aren't we...