Your garbage is my gold.

When a plot of ground gets graded for a house, a fair number of junipers are usually bulldozed to their deaths. And since cedar is often reluctant to rot, there they sit: shoved off to one side, a haven for rats and rattlesnakes.

I've got a couple of neighbors who, hearing I've switched to a wood-based economy for my heating, have invited me onto their places to haul the crap off. One of them has gotten kind of insistent about it. Guess I can't blame him: The 'dozer guy must have wiped out a brazillian trees, and they're stacked up like a hedgerow darn near a hundred yards long. Been there for years.

A lot of this isn't of much use to me. The dozer half-buries them in dirt, and cedar does rot sometimes. But it also often doesn't, and so I've been driving around with the trailer behind the Jeep, collecting trailer-loads. Once they're back on my place, an hour on the sawbuck with the chainsaw gives me a couple of days' firewood without even raising a sweat.

It beats hauling the stuff out of the boonies, and this time of year I don't have to worry about snakes.