I love having a fire in our fireplace! We had an outdoor fireplace at one of our houses growing up and a wood stove at another, plus I had lots of campfire fun at summer camp. Maybe those memories contribute to my love of fire now. It’s a full sensory experience: the woody smoke scents, cracking and settling sounds, and all the pretty colors are comforting.

We have some logs leftover from when the gigantic pine trees in our yard were cut down. So my husband and I have been chainsawing them into manageable lengths and then chopping them into firewood. Fed up with chasing the pieces across the backyard as they were cut, Jeff discovered the tire method. The uncut log goes inside a used tire (we have some leftover from growing potatoes) and gets chopped there. The tire contains them and we put ’em in the wood pile from there. Cool trick, huh?