Word: cording
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...minister steps into the pulpit. In the pews sit a college student there against his will, a banker who twice contemplated suicide that week, a contractor on the take, a pregnant girl who feels life stir within her, a teacher hiding his homosexuality. "The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher. Two minutes from now he may have lost his listeners completely to their own thoughts, but at this moment he has them in the palm of his hand...
...assemblage of galvanized buckets and tubs and funnels. Hamilton (no kin to the patriot) is a pleasant man with wire-rimmed glasses, mutton-chop whiskers, and the dirty fingernails of a chronic tinkerer. As Pressler watches proudly, Hamilton pours fermented corn mash into his contraption, plugs in an electric cord, and begins adjusting valves. A tiny stream of alcohol squirts into a plastic bucket. The odor of the alcohol mingles in the room with the disquieting scent of dementia...
...spinning wheels, wasting time. Great deeds remain undone, great orthodontist bills are unpaid. Awash with self-doubt, he heaves the birch chunks out to lighten the truck, then jacks, wedges, winches and ponders. At last Linda groans free, and all that remains is to retrieve the half cord of jettisoned birch. There is never a thought of leaving the firewood behind: in darkest February, it will heat the woodsman's ten-room New Hampshire house for a week...
Buying a stove is one thing; figuring the economics of woodburning is quite another. The countrified city man who got Linda stuck in the mud has eight cords of wood, harvested from his own property, split and stacked under cover. He will heat his house this year for about $100 ?$55 for chain-saw parts, the rest for saw and truck fuel as well as stovepipe. Electric heating, which is built into his house, would cost far too much to think about; for oil, he would have to pay about $1,100 for the winter...
Stove owners who must buy some, or all, of their wood, on the other hand, clearly are not saving much money. Merle Schotanus, president of the New Hamp- shire Timberland Owners Association, calculates that a cord of dry hardwood stores the heating power of $135.90 worth of 90¢ oil. He lops an arbitrary $25.90 from the cordwood figure to allow for the fuss and muss of wood, and arrives at a break-even point of $110 a cord for wood-burners. Dry firewood sells for $80 to $90 in rural New England, for $90 in the Middle West, hovers between...