“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
