Birch Steam Notes is one person's record of a wood-fired pirtis on a small lake in the Aukštaitija forests, kept so that a good evening can be repeated and a bad one is not quietly forgotten.

The pirtis is a squat building of grey logs at the bottom of a sloping garden, a quarter of an hour on foot from the road that leaves Ignalina towards the forest. My grandmother's brother rebuilt it in his time, and the lower three courses of logs are older than anyone in the family can date. I took over the heating of it in the spring of 2023, when it became clear that nobody else was going to, and I began writing things down because I could not remember from one November to the next how long the stove actually takes.

What is here is a record rather than instruction. I heat one stove, in one room, with wood from one patch of forest, and everything I have learned is shaped by that room: how it holds heat after the third round, where the cold comes in under the door, which end of the top bench is unbearable in February and pleasant in July. Somebody with a different stove would read my timings and be misled by them. I would rather be exact and local than general and useless.

I make no claims about what steam does to a body. People around these lakes hold firm opinions on that and I have heard most of them from the bench, but none of them belong in writing from me. Comfort, timing, safety on the ice and manners can all be described, and that is what these pages describe. Nobody is named here, the neighbours least of all; nothing is for sale; and no one has ever paid me to mention a stove, an axe or a bundle of leaves.