This is a happy story and I'm going to string it out to almost Novel proportions.
Most of our house heat comes from burning firewood. We have enough forested land that we're able to easily provide for our own needs without denuding the place at all. We burn something on the order of ~12 honest cords a year. Wild Cherry, White Oak, Hard Maple, and an occasional Red Oak (only storm damaged RO trees or branches) make up the majority of our stock; I don't touch the two P's, pine or popular - garbage wood to my mind.
Without going into a great deal of detail here is how we (my son and I) have harvest wood for years. In the fall after the leaves are off I go up and start dropping trees. Of course I take whatever storm damaged trees I can find first. With the trees down I limb them right there in the wood and then I cut the remaining logs into 10~15 foot lengths. These I then I pick them up with a set of forks on our tractor and bring them out of the woods. That way they don't get dirt ground into the bark (which kills chain saw chains). I have a pair of long straight Popular trees laid out parallel to each other (a tractor width apart) along the ridge line of an open field and I stack my fire logs across them. So the logs are stacked out in the full day's sun, get a nice breeze constantly, and are up off the ground. I let them lay for a year so the bark falls off, and then we cut them to firewood length and split them. I also have mechanical (hydraulic) splitter. Once the rounds are split we stack the wood in long rows up off the ground on pallets where they age for another 2 years before we bring the wood down to the house for winter's use.
But somewhere along the line I got old and medical treatments (cancer) have left me unable to put in the kind of work I used to. So last year and this I've been taking my time and bringing logs out of the woods during the summer - a little bit at a time instead all at once in the fall. They've been stacked and drying but I just haven't had it in me to go up and cut them to length, let alone do much of anything else with them.
Now we back up 20 years. My son's two closest childhood friends were Mike and Jason, both of whom are black though my son is white. That's a mighty rare combination in West Virginia. Anyway in their early teens both Mike and Jason had some hard times at home and my wife and I sort of took them in. We fed them and gave them a place to stay and about as much adult advice as they could stand I suppose. Anyway we did what we could.
And the boys, all three of them, worked out pretty good. They are, of course, young men today with all the pressures and problems that go with young adulthood. But they are doing OK, though we don't get to see them as often as we'd like.
Today all three showed up dressed ready to work, and with enough brew with them to make sure that the day wouldn't be one of pure toil. And the boys went up on the hill and cut, split, and stacked every bit of three cords of wood for us and then brought another 4 truckloads of cured wood down to the house where they stacked it up for us too.
Anyone who says there is no such thing as Karma is out of of their mind, that's all that I can say.
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Very cool story! Nice to read good news once in a while!
Toward the end of last winter I bought a new wood-burner, a Jotul Fireside, the biggest they make. Its suppsed to be very efficient, and what little we got to use it last year seemed to confirm that it is. Almost anything would use less wood than the old EarthStove we used to have, which was basically a steel box with a big door that you could burn anything in, but ate wood like Godzilla marching through Tokyo. Needless to say it wouldn't bother me a bit to discover that we had a lot of wood left in the house pile come spring.
I loved your last sentence. Last month I loaned out the splitter to a friend and when we went up the hill to get it he remarked that my wood piles were like gold bars all stacked up at Fort Knox.
Here is a picture that I sent to another (wood burning) friend a couple of days ago. It was meant to be one of those "eat your heart out" photos that I sent solely for the purpose of instilling a strong sense of envy in him. Bwahahahahaha ..... I just couldn't help myself:
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Beautiful story.