Stop Hauling Firewood the Hard Way. 7 Cheap Things Make It Easier. Number 4 Lives by the Back Door

It's ten o'clock on a January night, the stove wants its last load, and the wood is sixty feet across the yard. Boots, no light, and back across the ice with an armload hugged to your chest and both hands full. Three cords a winter is five tons of oak, and you handle every pound three times. Fifteen tons through your hands. You are not too old to heat with wood. You're too old for the way you're moving it. Seven cheap things, in the order the wood travels from the pile to the stove. Three of them are free. None costs more than forty dollars. Two rails at your waist. The cart in the fall and the sled on the snow. Cleats and a lamp on the nail. The box by the back door, the one Ruth put in without asking me in 1983, which is why there is no ten o'clock walk at this house. The tote for the last twenty feet. A tire on the block. And a tool off the log landing I hung in the barn the day I retired and went back for eight winters later. What I learned at seventy, from my own porch, watching my neighbor Virgil do it right at eighty. Harlan Sawyer. Sawyer Ridge, Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Forty-two years in the timber, 1969 to 2011, and forty-five winters hauling my own wood. Stack it dry, friend. It keeps. A note before anybody writes in: if a doctor has told you not to lift, or your heart has been worked on, a pellet stove or a propane furnace is the right answer and the man selling it is right. If you can't get up off the floor without a chair, don't go to the pile alone in winter, and carry your phone. Nobody over sixty belongs on a roof: the chimney gets inspected once a year by a sweep (NFPA 211). The CDC reports that more than one in four adults 65 and older falls each year and that falls are the leading cause of injury death at that age. A cord is 128 cubic feet; buy by the cord, not the truckload.