As I’m settling in to write this, we’re getting our first dusting of snow. G provided updates all day, as the clouds grew heavier and the air got that “snow smell.” His impending glee was contagious.

As we left the house for basketball, he even got hopeful that a sudden blizzard would whip up and maybe practice would be called off. (After missing the first week and a half of the season due to quarantine, he was not looking forward to being behind the rest of the team.) He wasn’t that lucky, but by the time I picked him up two hours later, we had some accumulation, and by the time we got home, the grass was just about covered.

The car’s headlights caught Duncan cavorting through the flurries, his mouth stretched toward the sky, snapping at every flake that caught his eye. I hardly had time to stop the car before G jumped out to join him. I was glad to see that G had so much energy left, even though he’d just spent the entire car ride whining about “the pain, the pain.”

The rest of my evening’s plan relied on a little bit of labor from him and his brother. I needed a pile of wood dragged in from the wood pile so I could spend the rest of my evening cozied up by the wood stove with my laptop.

I have become a big fan of the wood stove during quarantine. Most of the time, my approach to the household heating bill is “put more clothes on.” Back in “the before times,” when we were seldom home longer than it took to suck down a quick meal, quickly change our clothes, or grab a few hours of sleep, it didn’t make much sense to keep the thermostat set at anything higher than we needed to to keep the pipes from freezing.

When we ended up stuck at home last spring, I shuddered at how quickly the coal bin was going down as everyone wanted their corner of the house to be toasty and warm in the cool morning, and then by the afternoon, everyone was trying to open windows and strip down because it was just too hot.

Enter the wood stove. My parents had the brilliance to install small stoves in the rooms where the family spends most of their time, one of them being the breakfast room where I set up my home office. With two Boy Scouts at my disposal, I am never more than minutes away from a roaring blaze in the little stove. I also have three sets of legs to dispatch to the large woodpile to keep my smaller one next to the house well-stocked. Gym class is frequently supplemented by sending them running to the woodpile to bring back a few armfuls of wood.

While the kids were happy when spring turned into summer and they were no longer my woodpile gofers, I was a little sad to say goodbye to my cozy friend. I traded in my fuzzy moccasins for flip-flops and put a decorative container on the stove top for the season.

However, the Wonderful Husband and I weren’t letting the kids off that easily. Every week, the WH left a few logs to be split, and as the summer went on, the woodpile grew and grew. Although I certainly enjoyed spending time in the sun and the pool this summer, more so than in previous summers, I eyed that pile of logs, imagining nights like tonight, ensconced in my comfy chair, reading or writing, while the fire crackled and snapped.

I must admit, there is one other aspect to my wood stove that brings me a little amusement: watching the boys’ faces as I literally burn up all their hard work. One day, I caught A rather stingily adding to the house pile.

“The more I bring down for you, the more you’re going to burn through, Mom!” he accused. He was not wrong. I’ve already begrudgingly pulled on an extra sweater rather than make the trip myself. It’s easy to get a big fire roaring when I have a nice-sized pile, and just as easy to tamp it back and just let it smolder when I’m running low.

The good news is that there is plenty more wood to be chopped and split. This fall has graced us with a few good windstorms that brought down some sizable branches, and we still have several larger trees that we’ve taken down over the last year to whittle down to size.

I’m not the only one who enjoys it, either. Everyone coming in from an early morning walk with Duncan spends a few minutes warming their fingers and toes at the fire, while he hunkers down in his favorite spot right in front of the stove. Wet hunting clothes get hung up on the clothes rack that gets pulled out of the laundry room and popped up next to the blaze. By the time our hunters have had their lunch, their clothes are usually nice and toasty and dry and ready to head back out for another few hours of soaking.

The stairwell where the heat from the stove rises has also become everyone’s favorite hangout on the second floor. I frequently find E parked on the top step with a book or her laptop. On more than one occasion, I’ve found a freshly washed kid, wrapped in a towel, just enjoying the warm “breeze” that rises up around them.

Henry David Thoreau said something along the lines of “every man looking at his woodpile with affection.” While I’m not so sure my kids feel affection toward the woodpile, I have no doubt that some day they will. In the meantime, I have plenty of affection for both the woodpile, and the wood stove.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.