Stove Wood

The previous owner left us a nice supply of cut/split aspen for the stove. And we burned through it like the paper from which it is made. We mixed it with about one load of pinyon that we brought with us from Escalante. Since the house is poorly insulated, it takes a lot of heat to keep it warm and we were soon looking for more. Someone had stacked some peices of elm behind the shed and we started cutting and splitting this for the stove. It, like pinyon, has a lot of BTUs, but it is dirty and ashy. When my father-in-law was heating his farm with wood I remember that he liked to say, "I burn one kind of hardwood. It is spelled with three letters and they are not E-L-M!" So, I suppose he'd be ashamed of me if I told him I was burning elm, which I won't. But, as I was loading the elm on the truck to bring around to the back porch, I thought of something an old-timer once said to me back east when I was burning Eastern White Pine in my stove. I had complained about it since it lacked the heat of oak. The old farmer looked at it, looked at the cold, grey, northeastern landscape, and said, "Well, it's better'n burnin' a snow bank."