Art by Alp Okyar

The fireplace is empty and you are freezing to the bone. The heat hasn’t kicked on, and the only warmth you know are the blankets you were once wrapped in. You throw on a sweatshirt or two, frantically trying to find socks so your feet won’t completely freeze the second they hit the floor.

It’s winter in New England.

That’s right. December to early March, and that’s not even counting the fall months or the intermission of winding up for spring. Puffy coats, broken thermometers, layers of shirts and sweatshirts, cars that sometimes need jump-starting in the arctic mornings, wooly hats and several pairs of gloves. This is what we face every year. Isn’t there any solution for better heat?

Just because we live in New Hampshire doesn’t mean we’re immune to the chilliness during the winter, despite what lumberjacks may perceive.

Speaking of lumberjacks… Have you ever realized how much heat you get from having bonfires? Have you ever been at a friend’s house who burns wood in their fireplace to maintain heat in their home?

What could your winter be like if your family stopped buying oil? Families pay thousands of dollars to heat their homes, and sometimes, it doesn’t always work. But using real, dense wood from our own state to burn can illuminate your whole home with happiness and the H-E-A-T that we so badly crave. Trust me, I know.

I do understand that not everyone has a chainsaw, and not everyone has the time to get wood in the first place. Maybe your family doesn’t even have a wood stove or the money to get one, but choosing to invest in these things might have you thanking yourself down the road.

My family burns wood for heat, so our furnace is used for heating water most of the time. We have a real wood stove, not a pellet one, and we “harvest” our own wood for the season years before. Now that we have established two tentfuls (each is about twenty feet long and ten feet wide) of cut, sawed, chopped, stacked, dry-wood, we’ll probably have heat for the next two winters.

And the feeling of building your first fire in the wood stove, all by yourself? It’s great!

Depending on how hot you let the fire run, and if you build it correctly, your house will be so toasty that you won’t even need layers!

We split the wood usually after it’s fallen or dead as often as we can, so we aren’t killing trees.

We use our own labor to pay for our heat. Most of the time, the wood is free, as long as we cut it and load it into our trailer or the bed of our truck by ourselves. It’s a lot of work during the spring and summer, but the more we do, the less burdensome.

Everything you do will pay off. Besides, do you really want to pay a little over 2 grand each winter on oil to heat your house when you become an adult?

Hold the cold… It can be ten below outside, yet still warm New England inside the house!