Whether it was growing up in Nevada, or just that we always had a home with a fireplace, it seems our summers included cutting firewood. Not necessarily cutting down trees, but cutting downed trees into fireplace-lengths, loading them into our truck, and then unloading and stacking the wood alongside the house when we got back home. 

A cord of wood is measured 4 ft x 4 ft x 8 ft long. Dad liked to have at least two cord split, stacked, and ready for winter before summer ended. As I recall our chevy pickup could hold at the most, maybe one-third to one-half cord? Along with his chainsaw, a five gallon gas can, a wheelbarrow to carry the wood back to the truck and a tool box—that didn’t leave much room for wood. But with the sideboards fitted into place on the truck we could carry quite a bit. Nevertheless, enough wood for burning during the winter generally meant 5-6 weekends spent in the forests north and west of Reno during our school summer vacation.

Though my older brother was only a year older than me, he was larger. I imagine that is why Dad eventually let him use the chainsaw. My job was always to be the carrier, carting the cut pieces of wood back to the truck and “stacking” them so as to maximize what we could bring back. All the work and none of the glory of being a junior lumberman!

Last year we hired a crew to take down four very large trees on our cottage property. These were oaks, walnut, and poplar trees, dense hard wood. I’ve let them lie in place for a year as they dried out and I figured out how to best to deal with them. 

I bought a Craftsman ten inch electric chainsaw from Lowes in the fall and started cutting off the smaller limbs and branches and stacking them to burn in our fire pit. 

As one would expect, the small saw proved ineffective when it came to cutting up the tree trunks. I hoped to buy a larger gas powered saw through one of the estate sales we love to shop. That didn’t work out, they generally sold for more than what I wanted to pay for a used piece of equipment.

So this year I finally bought a new chainsaw. It’s 16 inches, not a beast but it can definitely cut through some wood! 

I came across an old photo of my niece out with her Grandpa cutting wood. I wasn’t surprised to see that Dad had continued to collect wood for the fireplace (which by then had been outfitted with a fireplace insert). The photo is likely from the late 1980s, Dad had to be in his sixties by then. It’s gratifying to see that he was still at it, though undoubtedly my brother was there alongside him to help load the truck. I think more than gathering firewood, Dad enjoyed spending time in the woods. It was rugged life that I didn’t appreciate at the time. But the longer I am out with our own small forest, delimbing fallen trees and clearing paths, the more I find I am like him. I still have more trees than time ahead of me and there is work to do. Time to get to it.