I live in Wisconsin, where the winter will pounce on you and tear the warmth from your back with its claws, like a great mountain lion toying with its prey. The woods wrap themselves in cloaks of snow that highlight every branch and twig etched into the icy sky, and the clear, cold, still air freezes my breath in my beard. The lakes turn to hard glass as temperatures drop into the single digits or even below zero.
At such a time, one needs a fire. That may be why my wife and I made sure to buy a property with a woodstove. Of course, a stove or fireplace isn’t necessary today for heating purposes, but it still has a kind of magic antidote to the drear and cold of a northern January, even when it isn’t a primary heat source.
