All posts by Keith McCormic

Creative Works, Living Rightly, Projects

The freedom of firewood, holzhausen, and a sunny day.

As part of our commitment to living in abundance, my wife and I are trying to refinance our house.  I had a vacation day that I needed to use up, so I volunteered to stay home today and take the appraiser through our house, which is actually a three-family.

Toasting an egg roll over a fire after the October Snowmageddon of 2011This morning, after dropping the wife off at work (we have just the one minivan), I came home and started stacking more firewood on the holzhaus I’m building in the front yard.  Mind you, I don’t have a fireplace, nor a woodstove.  Really, I just have a little metal basin in that I can move around the yard and burn stuff.  Here’s a photo from last October, in which I’m reheating an egg roll over my fire basin.

So, why am I stacking up firewood?  Because I have it and no one I know wants it right now.  The wood came from the October “Snowmageddon” of 2011, which was roughly the third major tree-dropping event in my yard in the last two years.  As such, all of my usual outlets for getting rid of firewood have been saturated.  The last guy who took firewood from me offered me the stuff in his yard this time!

Do I have to stack it?  No.  Indeed, I could probably have just thrown it up on Craigslist as a free item and it would’ve been gone in a few days.  That said, I’d already bucked it (cut it up) and split it, so why shouldn’t I gain the value associated with turning waste wood into usable fuel?  By value, I don’t necessary mean money, by the way.

Value could mean goodwill, if for instance, I give it to someone who needs it.  It can also just mean the feeling of having a stockpile of dried firewood as a sort of metaphysical connection to the lifestyle to which I want to become accustomed- i.e., having a fireplace!

My little holzhaus as of February 6, 2012.So, until I figure out what to do with my little pile of firewood, I’m slowly turning it into a holzhaus (German for “wood house”).  A holzhaus is a neat little way of stacking firewood into a round tower instead of square or rectangular blocks.  Here’s a photo of my work-in-progress.  As you can see, it’s only about four feet in diameter and about two feet tall at this point, say 0.20 cords.

 

That’s not a lot of firewood, but it carries enormous symbolic weight.  I can have firewood.  I can cut it up and split it and stack it by myself, not because I need to, but because I want to.  I have the freedom to turn the waste from a natural disaster into something useful and, in some sense, pretty.

In this way, my holzhaus is more of an art project, something to dabble at to give me a sense of triumph and rugged individualism as well as a deeper respect for nature and an understanding of our limited ability to control the world around us.  My little wood house reminds me that it is for us to make of our world the best we can from what we have and from there to do better still.  From that one intention, all else grows.