Crackling Fire

“I have been told some people have fireplaces but never start fires in them because they might leave a residue of soot on the firebricks or otherwise smudge the cleanliness of a room.  Each to his own, but for me, a fireplace without a fire is like a house without people.  Just as it takes warm beating hearts to make a house a home, so it takes flames to make a fireplace.” 

-Mel Ellis in Notes From Little Lakes

      It’s raining to beat the band right now, meaning that it’s raining hard.  In fact, it’s raining so hard that I can easily hear it drumming a rhythm on the metal chimney cap over the crackling of the burning wood in our fireplace.  It’s a brief reprieve from winter’s grip I suppose, which is probably why the sky is flashing with lightning, revealing in snippets the soggy, high banks of snow outside as thunder shakes the house with mighty authority.  It’s a day to be reckoned with.

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            I was suppose to take a group of teaching colleagues outside for a hiking adventure and cookout this morning, but that became postponed because of this incoming storm.  Freezing rain was in the forecast, and although that wouldn’t typically deter me, the driving that others had to do to get to my house, and then the driving we had to do to get to our destination was going to be a bit precarious to say the least.  In the end it didn’t do much freezing, but it would have been absolutely nasty, which is to say that we would have had the lake and woods to ourselves had we gone.

            And so after some errands, I did take a short hike with our dog Kora down at our nearby creek.  Although it was under a light sprinkle, it was in between down pours.  I found a recently killed squirrel; the wing tipped prints of a hawk still visible in the snow.  I just knew I had seen something out along the edge of the field on our drive home, and the remains confirmed what I had suspected.  The creek itself was open from the ice, but what was left of its once icy lid was still cracked and stacked along the water’s edge.

            The hike was just what I needed to come back and start a fire in our fireplace.  To consecrate the lighting of the split wood, I dug out some of my classic books on such things; books that contain divine quotations on the combination of firewood, flames, and warmth that causes one’s eyes to glaze over in mesmerized flashbacks of meaningful fires once upon a time ago.

            See you along The Way…

“When I am going out for an evening I arrange the fire in my stove so that I do not fail to find one when I return, though it would have engaged my frequent attention present.  So that, when I know I am to be at home, I sometimes make believe that I may go out, to save trouble.  And this is the art of living too – to leave our life in a condition to go alone, and not to require a constant supervision.  We will then sit down serenely to live, as by the side of the stove.

Henry David Thoreau – The Heart Of Thoreau’s Journals