This morning when I came downstairs, Brett turned to me and said, “We need wood.”

I turned groggily to look at the wheelbarrow, which was full of logs and kindling, and looked sleepily back at him.

He smiled. “We don’t have enough to make it through the winter,” he explained.

My brain shuddered into motion. “Oh, yeah, we need wood. Definitely.”

Brett drove around the property this fall and pulled out all the fallen trees; so our woods don’t have much more to offer this year. We used to get screamin’ deals on wood from our friends’ parents, but the grandpa had a stroke this year and I don’t even know if his woods are even being managed. (I guess they have hundreds of acres, a very well husbanded plantation. They’d ring their trees and let them stand a year before cutting them down so they were all aged and dry. It was a really healthy, good looking forest. Brett would drive out there and they’d load his truck full of logs and he’d bring them home and split it all pretty much by hand. Have I mentioned my man’s my hero?)

It’s pretty expensive to buy those little loads of split wood you see advertised on pin boards around town; what we need is about a dozen entire trees to get us through the winter – wood heat is our primary heat source. I think we have about enough to get us through the next three weeks. Ugh. Trying to heat with propane would cost about a zillion dollars!