Getting the wood in
As we move through life we start to realize that there are two sorts of questions. The first are questions where I want to know the answer. The second are the questions where I need to know the answer. A very carefully defined subset of the earlier class. Think about it for a minute. Right now as winter approaches people are getting their wood-in. Is that still a thing? It certainly used to be. I know because I helped get the wood in. Here’s the thing though. The way we heat our homes has evolved and if I look back to where my ancestors came from, which I can do, I realize that they have a bit of a problem. Heating your house with wood is fine, as long as you have trees available. I was looking at some video from the Outer Hebrides where a number of my people lived several centuries ago. It might have been that the loss of tree cover is a modern thing but I get the feeling that they have not had many trees hanging around waiting to be burned for a very long time. The hills are bare. So are the fields. What did those people do back in the day? I imagine that wearing more clothes was always an option but what did you do when you needed to heat the kitchen. Or the bedrooms. With no trees available to cut and dry and split getting a fire raging must have been tricky. I now want to know. The question is not evolved to need to know but I imagine that it will as I ponder. We have many things like that in our lives. If I want water I can go to the kitchen and turn on the tap but it is not very long ago that someone would have had to go out to the well and draw a bucket and bring it in. With all the splashes and wait that evolves. My mother would have been sent down to the stream to collect water for the classroom. When it was her turn. Getting a pump and a tap was a much later convenience. One that would have been appreciated. And as for heating the stove in that classroom, there was a reliance on the parents to provide their share of the fuel. Something that a school board has not had to consider for a very long time.
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