Our Winter Ritual

And so it has begun. The long, crisp, dark Gippsland Winter…

Last week we woke to our first frost, a heavy one to get things started. Winter doesn’t do things by halves here in our chilly hills. Our piles of Autumn leaves were frozen stiff, our lawn crunchy with icicles and the bird bath solid. Thankfully, I think my garden went unscathed, but time will tell (and more frosts to come…)

Winter here brings frosts, sometimes even snow, that very crisp evening air, icy winds battering against our little farmhouse here on the hill and the inevitable firewood collection. Always with the firewood. It’s a Winter ritual that seems daunting and never-ending at times. The funny thing about firewood is that it gets used, burned in our fire to keep us cosy, dry our clothes, bubble our soup and warm endless cups of tea sitting atop for hours. Just when you get the huge sigh of satisfaction with a fully stocked and stacked woodshed…it begins to inevitably empty, leaving a gaping hole reminding you of next Winter’s ritual to begin again. Always with the chopping and splitting, splitting and stacking…

Matt said on the weekend he dreams of having a home without a wood heater, but still with a shed stacked to the rafters with firewood, just so he could look at it in sheer wonder that it would not be all burned and gone. Ha! But in all honesty, we love our wood fired heat, constant firewood chopping and splitting and stacking and all. We put ‘Firewood’ on our to-do list in late Summer, knowing that the long Winter will be upon us soon enough, and the big job looms through Autumn. But we were remarking over the weekend as we split, stacked, threw, split, stacked, piled the trailer, stacked in the shed, split some more…that it’s quite a nice job after all. There is something to be said for the rhythm you find in a weekend of wood chopping, and of course there’s the working together, we miss that (yes, even working in the yards with stroppy mama cows and prickly persona’s all round). Yes, the wood chopping took up all of our long weekend, yes it seems a never-ending task at times, but it’s also extremely rewarding and satisfying, especially for the neat-freak husband and his stacked-just-so woodshed.

We worked together all weekend, Matt on the chainsaw, me on the splitter, passing blocks of wood to and fro as we split, piling the dry wood into the shed for this Winter, the green wood under the blackwood trees in the paddock to dry out for the next Winter (or even the next). Eleanor slept soundly nearby inside our cosy farmhouse most of the time, warmed by the wood fire funnily enough, or was happy to sit in her pram reading her books or watching the dogs as Mummy and Daddy split, stacked, split, stacked…

Our never-ending Winter ritual.