The Joys of a Wood Stove

Biba Kayewich

I live in Wisconsin, where the winter will pounce on you and tear the warmth from your back with its claws, like a great mountain lion toying with its prey. The woods wrap themselves in cloaks of snow that highlight every branch and twig etched into the icy sky, and the clear, cold, still air freezes my breath in my beard. The lakes turn to hard glass as temperatures drop into the single digits or even below zero.

At such a time, one needs a fire. That may be why my wife and I made sure to buy a property with a woodstove. Of course, a stove or fireplace isn’t necessary today for heating purposes, but it still has a kind of magic antidote to the drear and cold of a northern January, even when it isn’t a primary heat source.

Often when we speak about a home, we put special emphasis on the hearth. “Hearth and home”—the two terms seem to fit together naturally. Why is that?

Tradition tells us that the hearth holds a special place in the home. In the days when houses were heated exclusively by fire, the hearth was the heart of the home. This source of light, heat, and socialization became the nexus of socialization. In the world’s colder regions, the onset of fall and winter naturally brought people to the fireplace or stove for the cheering, crackling warmth and light it bestowed. People gathered by the fireside, where they talked and told stories, danced, and played music. You encountered a double warmth by the flickering flames: the warmth of the fire and the warmth of companionship and love.

Our wood stove connects my family to this tradition. When we fire up the stove, it brings the room to life and draws everyone toward it. People love to gather around it and watch the twisting, leaping flames through the stove’s glass front. When we’re gathered there, we share an experience not only with one another but also with countless men and women who have gone before us.

In his essay “The Work of Local Culture,” agricultural writer Wendell Berry described a custom from his part of the country, still within the reach of living memory, called “sitting ‘till bedtime.” Berry wrote, “After supper, when they weren’t too tired, neighbors would walk across the fields to visit each other. They popped corn, my friend said, and ate apples and talked. They told each other stories. They told each other stories, as I knew myself, that they had all heard before. Sometimes they told stories about each other, about themselves, living again in their own memories, and thus keeping their memories alive. Among the hearers of these stories were always the children. When bedtime came, the visitors lit their lanterns and went home. My friend talked about this, and thought about it, and then he said, ‘They had everything but money.’”

In winter, sitting and talking would have taken place around the family hearth, as the tongues of the flames licked the stone chimney. When I light my own fire, I understand better what these old farmers and their families experienced, and why the household hearth was a beacon of light in a dark world.

Spark and Flames

A fire is a feast for the senses: it warms your skin; it delights and mesmerizes your eyes; its gentle crackle and click soothes the ear; its pleasant pinewood scent fills your nostrils. Yet, as philosophy professor John Cuddeback points out, a fire doesn’t absorb your attention in a way that makes you neglectful of your companions—like a TV might. Instead, it helps spark interaction and conversation, rather than smothering it. I’ve had great conversations with my family and closest friends while gazing into the living flames of a good fire.

A wood stove connects you to the past—and all the people who once relied on them for survival, not just comfort. It connects you to the people around you in the present, too. As everyone sidles up to the fire, conversation, laughter, and camaraderie naturally ensue. But the wood stove has even more joys and secrets. It connects you to your own body as you use your hands to chop wood, gather it, build a fire, and light it.

With the help of my brother-in-law, I recently took down an old dead tree by my driveway, cut it into logs, and split them by hand with a splitting maul. I carted them to my woodpile in a small wagon. The process took longer than I thought and tired me out more than it should have, but when I was done, I surveyed with satisfaction row upon row of neatly stacked firewood, ready to heat my home and keep my family warm. My tired muscles told me of the work I had put in. What better way to work them than gathering this stock of fuel as insurance against the cold, bitter days ahead?

The satisfaction involved with heating your home through wood from your own property, gathered with your own hands, is difficult to describe. You feel a certain synchronization of your body with the tree, the land on which it grew, and the flame it feeds. There’s a completeness to the process seen from start to finish that can be hard to find elsewhere.

The process of lighting a fire carries its own magic. When we light a fire, we celebrate a ritual. Like all rituals, there’s pleasure in the process, especially in repeating it again, time after time, in just the same way. You must work with the materials and their nature. You must learn their secrets. But if you do so, if you find the right ritual, the wood will unlock its inner strength in a burst of light, the captured energy of the sun itself, suddenly unleashed in your own living room as a flame leaps to life. It’s a miracle every time.

That’s the joy of having a wood stove.