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Burn baby burn
Dec. 11th, 2005 12:31 amI can sit beside a fire and be content, whatever else is happening in my life. Everything dark or complicated or sought has to sit outside that circle of warmth, tapping their claws and blinking yellow eyes, while I sit in my rocking chair and let the wood burn down to coals. I have my own fireplace, now. I have firewood neatly stacked on the porch, just outside my door. I have a cat who looks almost as content as I was, curled up toasty-furred in the rocking chair (now that I've left it). I can't quite express how happy all that makes me.
It almost wasn't a fire, this first fire of mine. I'm a fair firemaker, but we have no fireplace tools and no andirons. My mom is donating a set to us when we go home for Christmas, but until then I need to stir the fire with a stick of kindling, arrange the embered logs gingerly by hand, prop them against the wall to create an airflow. This makes for a difficult build. All through tonight's movie, the fire faded, and sputtered, and finally died—only to blaze up, all by itself, just before the credits. Since then, it has burned merrily; it's all transformed to embers now, and I wish for marshmallows.
We bought our wood from the Wood Guy, a friendly local character who's got 30 acres of wild land carved out of the strip malls around Rt. 9. Here is the image of him you should have: before he would sell us wood, he had to finish feeding his guinea hens. (They disdained the raisin bread, but went after the cornbread.) We did not get to see, but did get to hear about, the crippled goats he saved from the meat wagon. The man knows his wood; he's the sort of fellow you feel good buying from.
It almost wasn't a fire, this first fire of mine. I'm a fair firemaker, but we have no fireplace tools and no andirons. My mom is donating a set to us when we go home for Christmas, but until then I need to stir the fire with a stick of kindling, arrange the embered logs gingerly by hand, prop them against the wall to create an airflow. This makes for a difficult build. All through tonight's movie, the fire faded, and sputtered, and finally died—only to blaze up, all by itself, just before the credits. Since then, it has burned merrily; it's all transformed to embers now, and I wish for marshmallows.
We bought our wood from the Wood Guy, a friendly local character who's got 30 acres of wild land carved out of the strip malls around Rt. 9. Here is the image of him you should have: before he would sell us wood, he had to finish feeding his guinea hens. (They disdained the raisin bread, but went after the cornbread.) We did not get to see, but did get to hear about, the crippled goats he saved from the meat wagon. The man knows his wood; he's the sort of fellow you feel good buying from.
