Granddad blogging: Chopping wood

Last week my granddad experienced some tough love, this week it's all about heating the house.

The locust trees have pretty flowers on ‘em that smell good. The bees liked ‘em but they also have thorns on them and they would fall off. Little old barefooted boys runnin around would step on these thorns and get ‘em up in their foot and then they would start hurting and they would fester and you had to lay down and hold your foot up and let your mother take a needle and poke around and stick and finally pick those thorns out of there before they would get well. So I was never very fond of locust trees.

We had a great big locust tree right outside the front door of our house. I remember it was a big one. The trunk was as big around as you see on some big beech trees, big poplar and big oak trees. It had a big holler in it, and we lived up on a hill and storms came through an awful lot. They worried about that tree blowin over on our house for a long time. Finally a storm blew down some other locust trees, but didn’t blow that one down. So my daddy cut it down and cut it up into firewood. And we burned it up a stick at a time one winter.

We had to heat our house with wood that we cut. We would cut wood in August when the leaves were beginning to come off and the sap was going down and the wood was pretty dry, but still enough moisture in it to where you could saw it better than you could when it was real dry.
We had to do it with a cross cut saw. You pull the saw to me and backwards and forwards. Backwards and forwards and we piled up the wood back in the woods and then I think about November or the last of October we’d haul it up to the house and ricked it up between those various locust trees right at the house. We threw some of the wood off down in a wood pile we had and that wood had to be cut up in smaller chunks. We’d split it and make firewood for the stove. We’d pile up a great big pile of stovewood. Great big, I guess six feet tall.

Lot of people just cut stove wood as they needed it, but my daddy wanted to get it all cut and piled up. Sometimes we’d rick it up and sometimes we wouldn’t, but we always ricked up the firewood for the fireplaces. I had the job of carrying it out of the rick and rickin’ it up on the porch. And we burned lots of wood.

We lived in a house that used to be an old schoolhouse. Somebody had bought that property with the old schoolhouse on it and they took it and made it into a house to live in. The man’s name was Curt North, I never did see or know Curt North. But that was the name, and that’s who my daddy bought 70 acres of land that had this school house that had been made into a place to live in.

We lived there for a long time, and when I lived there it never was insulated it was just weather boarding on the outside, studding, and then some kind of planks of stuff on the inside that we’d put this canvas on and paper it then. And the wind came in under the doors through the cracks. In the room where we stayed all the time there was a hole about the size of a big marble in the floor. When we’d clean the floor, we’d pour soapy water, boiling hot water all over the floors and mop it and sweep it out through that hole.

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