I gathered an armload of firewood on the front porch to carry inside. I paused to admire two neatly stacked wood piles across the front yard. Each stack is ten feet long and two rows deep. Then I looked to the far side of the driveway; where I have another eighteen-foot-long stack, two rows deep. I smiled, knowing the biggest pile, twenty-eight feet long, also two rows deep, was behind the house in the backyard. I carried my wood into the house and stacked it on the hearth next to the wood stove.

The house was warm. It's a special kind of heat that comes from a woodstove, and I love not he...