When my husband Tim sees a truck heaped with cut-to-length firewood he will stop and gaze longingly — the same wistful expression that some men display when a Ferrari 458 Spider barrels down the road. But Tim virtually salivates at the sight of harvested logs. He loves felled trees, cutting them into wood-stove length, splitting the logs with wedges and sledge hammers, stacking and storing the wood for heating next year or, more likely, the winter after that.

Sometimes on the Island, a property owner will take down a tree or two, cut the wood into 18-inch logs, and leave it in disarray at the side of the road. No need for a sign; the message is well known. Help yourself. The forager who drives by first will collect enough free logs to keep his family warm for an extra week or two a couple of winters from now. Like makers of fine wines, wood stove connoisseurs know that logs need to be kept under cover for at least a year to dry out, better yet two years, before the fuel is burned to heat the house.

Because this precious commodity is often stored outdoors, it can become a target for theft. Our friend Don noticed that his wood pile kept shrinking. He suspected the guy next door. Then one early winter morning Don saw boot tracks in the light snow, leading from the kitchen door next door straight to his wood pile and back. Maybe the pilferer wanted to be caught, as in “Stop me before I steal again.” Now the two no longer speak to each other and Don’s firewood is better secured.

The wood stove became a member of our family some time in the mid-seventies. We are on our fourth stove. Our fifth if you count the mongrel that first came into our living room, an industrial-strength, mean-looking brute that a friend was trying to unload from his basement. It looked as if it came from a cellar in northern Chechnya. It didn’t take much complaining or whining on my part to get it out of the house and back to its original owner.

Then it became a study of the best brands, Scandinavian or American. We’ve stuck with American, the same prototype that is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian as an example of American righteousness, rectitude, hard work and moral superiority. Even its name, Defiant, suggests something of the revolutionary spirit.

This model, velvety black cast iron, has glass doors with a sunburst of mullions, semi-cabriole legs, carved panels on the sides and a curly bracket to hold drying rods. The Scandinavians wouldn’t create such a girly design. Our stove is a focal point which announces itself in the living room, the center of our seating arrangement, a shrine, a brawny and handsome exemplar of the noble work it does. Good job, Blackie.

It’s like buying a car, or maintaining one. Some people know by sight the difference between a rear suspension upper control arm and an automatic transmission control valve. Tim, who shies away from automotive discourse, knows when you need to clean your chimney and your catalytic combustor, how to delicately adjust the damper, and replace the gaskets. He can tell you why you burn pine in spring and fall, a soupcon of locust mixed with oak on the coldest winter days, and he has several gourmet recipes in between.

I like to warm up the stew or soup in a pot on top. They say I could, but I haven’t tried, to cook from scratch on the griddle surface, whose temperature is unfathomable, unmeasurable. We dry mittens on the rods that protrude from the sides like antennae.

Heat is heat, you might think. But that’s not so. Heat from a wood stove soaks into the upholstered furniture and the rugs and curtains, and then deals itself back to us as cozy comfy mother-hugging warmth. A soporific kind of heat that rises higher than you would ever set your oil burner thermostat, and the older I get, the more I savor it. Besides, if you really feel chilly, you can walk right up to it, lift your shirt and get a near toasting, something you can’t do in front of your floor register. The biggest plus is gazing from the couch into the fire, feeling its primitive beauty while stroking our chin in deep thought, solving the world’s problems and sticking it to Big Oil.

On summer evenings, Tim pulls a lawn chair beside his outdoor wood pile next to the wood shed, which is already full to the rafters, and he admires it all until the sun fades in the west. He will get up once in a while and place a fat stumpy log upright on another thick log base, pound a few wedges into the cut end to initiate a few cracks, and pound at the vulnerable cracks with a sledge hammer until the wood splits apart into several suitable logs, and then he stacks them into a mound for winters to come.

The wood stove is not my department. I never load it, strike a match, shovel out the cinders and ash. I don’t fell trees, don’t cut and split and stack or trudge the wood into the house. People who do these things will remind you that wood heats you twice. I merely live with it like it’s a favorite house pet, and benefit from Tim’s passion and the stove’s reliable generosity.

Eileen Maley lives in West Tisbury. This essay is excerpted from a memoir in progress.