Nights and mornings in the winter months are best spent next to the wood stove. It is a good time for reflection, and a cozy place to remember all of the great jobs of the year gone by.

As I feed the fire, I try to remember working each piece of wood down through the crown. A whole year of pruning and removing Ash, Maple, Locust, Birch, Apple, Tulip Poplar and the list goes on and on. There is a real satisfaction in warming yourself by the fire, burning the wood you cut and rigged. Not only because of the small sense of sustainability in a high tech world, but because of the rich memories it brings of the year past.

I’m leafing through Hal Borland’s Twelve Moons of the Year as I sit in my chair drinking coffee, and I’ve come across a wonderful passage of his from an essay titled The Open Fire:

“Consider the hearth. Once it was simply the floor of a cave, but ever since man tamed fire it has been the symbol of home, of safety, of reassurance in an uncertain world. Beside his hearth a man could rest and dream of tomorrow, for it was warmth, it cooked his food, it was security from feral foe as well as from cold and darkness. Around his fire man built his home, and at his hearth he knew the comfort of family and friends.

What does it add up to? A flame, a puff of smoke, and an ember. And, strangely, a fireplace in an age that fractures atoms. And yet, the memory persists, even in the dancing flame. There is independence, there is even identity, at the hearth. There is a man, and his fire, and his home, and his own security, at least as long as the ember glows,” (Borland, page 19).

The fire is an ancient commodity. With it comes this sense of independence that Borland mentions, even in a modern world. And even the modern arborist with all of the massive production machines available to eat and destroy the wood we cut for huge profit, can appreciate loading up a wood stove with pieces of wood carried home from a long and tiresome job.

I laugh at the technology advertised now of being able to control your thermostat at home from a remote vacation island in the Caribbean from an app on the smart phone. This is certainly a different kind of independence from the one Borland writes of. But no one can really feel a security of home, or escape the frigid cold and darkness nestled up next to their 6s.

We are modern arborists in a very modern world. Many things have changed even since Borland’s writing, but the flame of the ancient fire still produces the same emotions that it did millennia ago, when those people sat in the wilderness watching the flames dance. I doubt they collected wood the same way we do, either by plunge cut or double blocking or speed line or GRCS or crane, but the heat from that wood still feels the same.

I go out to the back porch and grab a strait piece of Ash. I think this particular chunk was split about a month ago, cut up from a job maybe in September. In fact, I actually remember that job, making snap cuts high above a wood fence. Yes, that’s right, this was the piece that I had thrown out into the drop zone, and it kissed a lump of wood already sitting down there and shot out across the root flare and hit the bottom of the fence too hard. I remember the worry that rose up in me thinking I had damaged someone’s property. “All good” echoes up from the ground. And the only thing that brings more comfort than a close call like that with this piece of wood is watching it’s ember glow.