The Rick

A cord of firewood is four feet by four feet by eight feet. I know because the man who delivered it told me, and then he told me again, which I took as a warning.

He dumped it in the driveway at ten in the morning. By noon I'd decided it was going to be a stack, not a pile. A pile is what happens to wood. A stack is what you do to it.

I laid down a base. I alternated the ends so it would stand up by itself, like a cabin. I sorted by size. At one point I stepped back and the light hit it and I got a little choked up.

It took until Sunday. It's the best thing I've ever built that didn't need a permit.

Now, it's winter. We're cold. And I can't take a log off it.

You can't pull one from the middle, that's structural. And I'm not taking one off the end, because then the end isn't even.

So we've been burning fence slats and a bag of pinecones. My wife asked what the point of a woodpile is if we can't burn it. I said look at it. She looked.

She said, "It's very straight."

The house is sixty-one degrees. The woodpile is perfect.