"Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you." Saint Augustine

My father in law likes to say that when you cut your own wood, as we do here in the Pecos mountains of Northern New Mexico, it warms you three times--once when you cut it, twice when you split it, and three when you burn it!

With the French Prime Minister saying the world is "on the edge of the abyss" (that sounds terribly French), I am warmed yet again to look out my windows and see the four cords of juniper and pinon wood we've cut and split this year.

Jack Bauer felled 26 trees a couple of Saturdays ago (our eleven year old son Cole was counting), and the kids and I filled up the back of the pickup truck plus a trailer. I've never been so exhausted in my life, although it is fun to get to yell "timber".

I know what it's like to be cold.

The farmhouse I grew up in was 250 years old, near Lake Erie, in rural Ohio. To give you an idea of how cold it could be, once in highschool, I missed a full month of school due to snow. It seemed to blizzard non stop for days and days, with the wind chill off the lake sometimes getting to 65 below. It was a frigid place. We occasionally had ice inside our old windows, kind of like what Whitehorsepilgrim describes about the winters in his childhood home. We wore long johns all winter long, slept in flannel sheets and heavy quilts my mom sewed together from fabric scraps, and I recall an Icelandic wool sweater I wore both during the day and to bed. Our heating oil tank in the basement was always full, but we had to use it sparingly.

My first husband was too lazy to head to the mountains for wood, and one hard gray winter, I recall regular dumpster diving at Santa Fe construction sites for junk wood to burn in the two wood burning stoves of my Pojoaque valley adobe. In retrospect, that was my own private adobe version of the McMansions that drive me wild, especially in light of what people living beyond their means with their sub prime loans has gotten us into as I write this. I got talked into it by someone to whom appearances were everything. And appearances were so important that he couldn't be seen chopping wood. Never mind if we couldn't afford firewood (or furniture) after we barely made the mortgage payment. Sometimes my two kids were in the truck when I made these dumpster forays for firewood, snugged up in their car seats in their winter coats and coveralls from the second hand store, while mom did what she had to do to keep them warm.

We have neighbors who just moved into our area from San Francisco, and we've spent some time this late summer and early autumn helping them learn how to chop their own wood, which has been an eye opening experience for these two city slicker women who've decided to relocate to our wild and wooly part of the world. They've been delighted to learn how to use our wood splitter this year. In fact, it's currently sitting over at their place next to their growing woodpile. Sure beats splitting it by hand.

I guess I just don't want to see anybody cold. If the abyss is yawning, although I'm not entirely prepared to become French and do the whole chicken little thing yet, then Jack and the kids and I will be building a good warm fire on its gaping edge.