Burning the wood I cut

The load of wood I just brought in this week is all wood that I cut. Some of it, in fact, is wood from the first year I was cutting my own, including parts from that incredibly dense tree that killed one chainsaw and almost killed another back in 2008. That tree sat for more than a year before it had dried enough that I could split it, so it's only now finally worked its way up to where I'm burning it.

And boy, was I right, it's some incredible wood. The pieces are so big and dense, one of them burns for hours. But it's dried so long that they aren't even that hard to get started up. What we've been burning this year is mostly rock maple that we bought, and that's good wood, it lasts a good long time, but it's nothing compared to these wedges.

Of course they're also cut a lot more unevenly, at different lengths, not always split as far, and a lot bigger pieces with jagged shapes. They're hard to stack and sometimes hard to fit into the woodstove.

So, like I wrote once before, there's that subtle satisfaction of knowing that the wood that's keeping me warm now is wood I brought in myself. (This particular tree is probably the same age as me, so I'm being kept warm by the same sunlight that has been with me my whole life, too.) But unlike last time I wrote about this, this time, not only is it nice to be burning my own wood on an emotional level, it's also really, really good wood.