Whenever I work on stacking firewood for the winter, I find myself at some point singing that 1960’s song, “I Fought the Law and the Law Won”. I find some dark humor in the line, “breaking rocks in the hot sun” and think that I am engaged in a similar monotonous task. The time to stack firewood for use in the winter is in the late spring and early summer. Usually there is at least one brief period where the temperatures are especially high and the sunlight feels particularly hot. On those types of days it is not unusual to change your clothes or take another shower due to the exertion perspiration. Many times, however, you can get into a rhythm and a mental state that almost feels like meditation.
Stacking firewood is both an easy and a challenging task. The easy part is picking up a piece of split firewood from a jumbled pile and moving that wood into an even stack with a large number of other pieces of wood. The challenging part is that the stack must be balanced properly so that the stack does not collapse. Adding more weight of the wood into more height of the stack make the challenge all the more difficult. That is one reason why two measures of stacked firewood are the standard cord and the face cord, both of which are only four feet tall. A stack that is only four feet tall is a good balance of weight and height. In order to go heavier or taller, one usually needs a framing system or a woodshed. Both are time honored options.
I’ve used both systems at different times. A frame and tarp system supported and covered my firewood for a couple of years. It certainly was an inexpensive solution but it was not easy digging the wood out from under several feet of snow on a dark January evening after work. It didn’t take too many winters to see the wisdom of a woodshed.
The woodshed makes a taller stack easier to build because there are walls to help contain and support the stacked wood. The issue to be aware of in a woodshed is stacking the wood in such a way that it does not collapse when wood is stacked or removed. And it is most preferable that the stack does not collapse on someone removing the pieces in the darkness of a winter evening (or at any other time). A taller stack requires more care through the building process so that it can stand straight and ready for use.
The meditations that occur during the process of stacking wood can be as simple a feeling the muscles, bones, and joints work together to accomplish physical labor. Sometimes it can be thoughts about other tasks that also need completion and the prioritization of those additional tasks. The mind and the body are working together to complete a job and to consider the next steps of progress. It is easy to get into a physical and mental rhythm until the job is completed for this season. There is a saying that wood warms you multiple times: in the cutting, splitting, stacking, and burning. It is good to consider your preparation for a possible long, cold winter.