Another Brush Pile Burn As Dead Trees Keep Attacking Me

Last Saturday, the second half of my immense brush pile at my house in St. Albans finally went up in flames.  It felt so good to get rid of it all.

Husband Jeff huddles in the falling snow while
we wait for my brush fire to really get going last Saturday.dd caption

Unlike past fires, when one match and one piece of newspaper was all it took to get the discarded wood burning, this fire was hard to come by.

It snowed the night before, and we'd had plenty of cold rain, wet snow and damp, dreary weather recently to make the pile wet.

Jeff and I frantically shoved papers, cardboard boxes, more papers, newsprint and discarded envelopes into the sputtering flames, hoping to generate enough heat to evaporate the moisture and get a roaring fire.

After 45 minutes, we finally got results, and off it went.

Brush is always accumulating in my yard. Branches fall in storms, trees die, other trees are just plain ugly. It's a hazard of living in (relattively) rural Vermont.  So the brush piles high.

It's always cathartic to burn the brush away, even if it isn't necessarily the best method to deal with this environmentally. The big ugly pile is gone, and there seems to be so much more space in the yard, even if the brush pile didn't really take up much room to begin with.

When I burned the brush Saturday, a wet snow was falling and there was a chilly wind. I'd worked up a sweat as Jeff and I moved more brush toward the pile to throw in on the pire once the big initial flames died down.

The sweat and the wind and the snow began to chill me off big time.

Jeff had work to do, so he went back into the house.  I stayed and tended the remains of the fire.  It got to the point where it was mostly just the larger chunks of wood burning slowly and very hot.

I huddled by the heat for awhile. I felt myself warm up again quickly. My emotional temperature improved, too, because I'd gotten a good bit of exercise hauling brush, and accomplishing something for once.

For you pyromaniacs out there, here's a quick video of our brush pile efforts last week.