Building Character and Strength

Every year, we go out and cut wood for the season. Cutting wood and chopping it makes you stronger. We have a wood stove in the living room to keep us warm all winter long. We must cut enough wood to last us till March or until the weather warms up. That takes a lot of wood cutting.

When it comes time to cut, we hook the trailer to the truck or tractor, load up the chain saw, and head out to get a trailer load of wood. We cut dead trees that have fallen or are about to fall. Sometimes we cut the trees that have been blown over in a storm, and they still are alive. That’s the wood we use for the next year, because it’s still green and needs to be seasoned. The logs that are too big to fit in the wood stove, we put in a pile to split later.

After we get a load of wood, we take the load back to the house and start stacking it. The wood that’s still green we put in a different stack. The wood that’s dry we put in a stack to burn that year. The best wood to burn is seasoned hard wood like oak and ash. The difference between hard and soft wood is, hardwood trees have broad leaves and usually bear fruit or nuts. Soft wood trees usually have needles instead of large leaves and are extremely sappy and sticky. Hardwoods are normally denser than soft wood, and easily burn longer. Softwood may burn for an hour, but a hardwood log about the same size may possibly burn for quite a few hours.

A couple of days ago, Trey brought over a log splitter he had borrowed, so we could split our wood the easier way. While Isaac used the log splitter, I got a maul and started splitting some smaller logs by hand. I started to warm up, so I took off my jacket. Wood cutting gives lots of exercise. Some of the pieces of wood were easy, and I could split them in half with one chop. But some were tough and took more time to do. The logs I couldn’t split, I let Isaac split with the log splitter.

When you split wood by hand, it builds character and strength. It’s fun to see how many chops it takes to split the log, and how many logs you can split. Sometimes we have a contest to see who can split the most wood. I enjoy splitting wood. When winter times comes, we will come into the house from out of the cold and be nice and toasty and warm, thanks to the trees that gave us warmth.

~Jonah