Wood Stove
by Heidi Barr
excerpt from Woodland Mantiou by Heidi Barr
Two weeks ago, a lanky man and his assistant rambled up to the house bearing silver stove pipes and ladders and left two hours later as we gazed at our newly installed wood stove. We got it from a guy across the river that didn’t need to have it around and was willing to let it go for a reasonable price that included dropping it off in our garage. After living for all of my adult years without wood heat, having a stove in the middle of the living room feels a bit like returning to home soil after a long journey away. I grew up in a house that was heated exclusively by a wood stove, and I didn’t realize how much I’d missed the company of slowly burning logs until I invited them back into my daily life. And with it has come the task of operating the wood stove—something that Dad always did when I was growing up, and his administrations of which I look back on now wishing I’d paid closer attention.
There’s a bit of an art to efficiently using a wood stove, and I admire the commitment my parents had to the labor and routine that is required to make such a lifestyle work. Such a lifestyle requires chopping and splitting wood, curing the wood properly, storing it in a dry place, making sure there’s enough kindling to get a fire going, hauling the wood from the storage place into the house every day, clearing the ashes . . . and this is all before you even build a fire. Building the fire requires opening the damper, getting a good small fire burning, and then feeding it larger logs until the temperature and coal bed is hot enough to close the damper again to ensure an efficient use of the fuel. You can adjust the airflow too, for good measure. As autumn progresses and the air takes on more of a chill, I am thankful for the means to heat part of our home with the wood that grows abundantly in the forested land around our house.
Heating with wood is, for us, part of building a life that is centered on simplicity—one of the facets that I believe to be important in living in a sustainable and life-giving way. As we move toward heating more with wood and solar power, we use less fossil fuel and take our support from the corporations that feed on our dependence to those things. We aren’t independent of them yet. But every time we make a choice that takes energy from supporting corporations that are based on profit and greed for a few, we put more energy into building a system that is based on truth and abundance for all.
This is not to say that living in a simple way is easy. In some ways, it isn’t even simple. At first glance, it seems simpler to flip on the furnace when the temperature dips, rather than going outside to split wood. It is easier to sit down with a cup of coffee and the morning news, instead of using those first moments of the day to start a fire in the stove. The culture we live in today is built on the promotion of buying convenience. Choosing to do something by hand, or the ‘hard’ way doesn’t make sense through the lens of the American Dream.
So why do it? Because when we choose to live simply—when we see that we have enough, and usually more than enough—we live more fully and are part of the system that allows others to do the same. When we choose inconvenience overdoing things the easy or quick way, we offer our work to the benefit of those who don’t have the luxury of such a choice. When we choose to accept enough, we return home. We remember what it feels like to love without boundaries and to be content with what we have, whatever it may be.
Heidi Barr lives in eastern Minnesota (Mni Sota Makoce in Dakota) near the St. Croix River — on ancestral and contemporary lands of the Wahpekute (Dakota), a place that also holds significance for Ojibwe and Ho Chunk people — with her family where they tend a large organic vegetable garden, explore nature and do their best to live simply.
As a mother, spouse, gardener, wellness coach, and writer, she is committed to cultivating ways of being that are life-giving and sustainable for people, communities and the planet. Hiking through forests and across prairies, wading in streams, digging in the soil and surrounding herself with natural wonder helps her stay grounded in reality.
Author of Slouching toward Radiance, 12 Tiny Things, Cold Spring Hallelujah, What Comes Next, Woodland Manitou: To Be on Earth, and Prairie Grown: Stories and Recipes from a South Dakota Hillside, she is also the editor of The Mindful Kitchen, a wellness column in The Wayfarer Magazine. Every now and then she coordinates with yoga teachers and organic farms to offer retreat experiences and always makes really good scones. Her next book, Collisions of Earth and Sky: Connecting with Nature for Nourishment, Reflection, and Transformation comes out in January 2023.
In 2022, Heidi was a Poet of Place, a group of five regional poets who are advocates and ambassadors for poetry and creativity in the lower St. Croix Valley.
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