I married someone who is, in some ways, even more frugal than my own parents. This is a low bar -- or a high bar depending on how you think of frugality. This characteristic reveals itself most when it comes to energy consumption, so we can call it a high bar, in this case.
When my family moved to the farm in 1970, that was the official beginning of the wood stove phase of our lives. Our one story house had an oil furnace but our real heat source was an Ashley stove -- a wood stove with a metal cover around it so it looked more like a box and not like a real stove. You couldn't burn yourself by touching it. After the house burned down in 1974 (due to a crack in the clay collar that held the stove pipe as it went through the wall), my parents renewed their commitment to wood heat. When we rebuilt the house, they built a giant chimney right in the middle of the kitchen, one with several flues and a big fireplace. One of the flues was for the Mexican water heater that Dad installed just to the left of the fireplace. When we needed hot water, we had to build a fire in the little fire box at the bottom, and then we had to wait a while. At one point we were four teenagers in that house. I doubt we took as many showers as most teenagers.
Okay, I take it back. Jon is not quite as extreme as my father was. Our water heater runs on electricity. But it is set pretty low, and in the summer it uses the heat that comes out of the geothermal well.
When Jon and I moved out of DC and into our first house as a married couple, we went to the most rustic end of the spectrum possible in Fairfax County. No heat source, but there was a well and there was electricity. We rented a little two story house that had been moved to the middle of an old dairy farm, and in the process of moving, somehow it had slipped off the wheels and got a little bent. So the house was charmingly unlevel and leaky, but the roof was good. There was a woodlot right out back and Jon began his new career as a wood chopper.
He has been cutting and splitting and hauling wood for 32 years, and we have had a wood stove in all three of our houses.(So, in terms of sheer longevity, he wins. My dad only lasted 14 years as a wood heat specialist, although I am sure that had nothing to do with his early demise.) I am vigilant about the safety issues, having already lived through one house fire. Jon thinks I am over-cautious, but there is no such thing.
This stove is not as high tech as the one we had on Utterback Store Road. That one had a catalytic converter and was engineered to burn hot and slow all night. This house was designed without those issues in mind (size of stove needed for that sort of behavior), so we had to downsize our stove and our expectations. We make do. In fact, one of the main reasons we chose this house site -- one that is far less aesthetically pleasing and interesting than many of the others -- is that we knew that hauling firewood would be a priority and we sure didn't want to haul it down the Greenway. We were right.
Last year I was tempted to write about Jon's escapades in the woods, hauling logs down a steep hill and across a stream, but the stories might have alarmed Lilah, and I never told them. Let's just say Jon is not as cautious as I am about driving equipment, crossing waterways, getting stuck, etc. On more than one occasion he had to call to ask me to get the tractor so I could pull the loader out of the mud. The last time I told him we were not doing that again. It was just crazy.
We have finally hit a serious cold snap here, and our wood stove is chugging along. It isn't doing all the work of heating our house (we have our geothermal unit to back us up, and our solar panels don't you know) but it is making a big dent in our energy bill.
Yesterday, for the first time that I can remember, we cooked all of our meals on the wood stove, just because we could. We had eggs for breakfast (the easiest and quickest thing to cook) and I made a big pot of lentil soup which came out just fine, so simple, and I even made tapioca because Anna was coming over for dinner. We have this widget that gives us a reading on temperature (air, water, anything) so Jon could entertain himself by figuring out where the hottest surfaces were on the stove. Then he estimated how that compared to the electric stove. He was just making stuff up.
I can't prove it, but I am pretty sure we are in a teeny tiny minority, cooking on a wood stove in this super rich county. It's just one more way that we get to hone our resilience skills -- by being creative with our frugality. I am waiting for the water to boil so I can make some oatmeal, but I think it's just evaporating away, now that I notice what is really happening. Always more to learn. Jon has to explain relative humidity to me about three times a year, and I understand it until we get to another season and then I have to ask again. Somehow this is related to the fact that my oatmeal water is not boiling, I think. But maybe not.
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