Hot Commodities

A tongue-in-cheek guide to sourcing (very) local firewood this winter.

ll the wood heat literature emphasizes that dry wood burns better than wet, which leaves you with two choices: Either get some green wood and put it under cover for a year or so, or burn wood that is already good and dry, wood that you already have, wood that you can identify without special training. You need only look around you.

■ Rocking chairs: Any rocking chair that creaks is prime firewood. That creak means dry. It also means it will probably fall apart anyway, so you might as well get it first.

■ Louis Quatorze furniture: Wonderful stuff. Old enough to be very dry, big, heavy, with goodburning woods.

■ Queen Anne: Very high rating. About the only remaining dependable source of good walnut firewood.

■ Hepplewhite: Not recommended. Hepplewhite chairs look all right, but there just isn’t that much wood to them. You’ll burn through a set of six before midnight.

■ Shutters: Depends whether it’s a shutter that shuts. If it does, it could help you keep what heat you get. If it bangs, burn it.

■ Bamboo porch shades: You need the shades only in the summer, and you use the stove only in the winter. A real hand-in-glove arrangement.

■ Pianos: Pianos contain a great deal of champion firewood. Many people will hesitate, but if you can’t find middle C and haven’t had it tuned in more than five years, well.…

—Adapted from “The Very Last Word on Wood Heat” by Frank Heath, November 1978

We Were Right All Along

—Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888). Though she wrote hundreds of plays, novels, stories, and poems during her lifetime, this Massachusetts author is best known for Little Women. That novel, which turns 150 this year, definitely qualifies as one of the “more select” in U.S. literature: A recent Harris poll of Americans’ favorite books put Little Women at No. 8, right after The Catcher in the Rye and just ahead of The Grapes of Wrath.

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