A slow rain this morning, and I am waiting for a truck to dump two cords of firewood in my driveway: the first firewood I have ever purchased. For more than two decades we heated a house entirely on what Tom culled from our forty acres. It's amazing, really, how perfectly that piece of land kept us warm, and yet the woods remained beautiful, even pristine, for all of our tenure there. The year revolved around wood: finding it, cutting it, getting it out of the forest, cutting and splitting it, stacking it, carrying it into the house, stoking the stove.

The little stove here in the Alcott House is hardly more than decoration: nostalgia-warmth, not a life protector. And a Saturday spent stacking firewood is only a pale reflection of the anxieties of heat.

I miss that world; I don't miss it.