Today, I came home from delivering books (Buzz the Not-So-Brave!) with my toddler, and, because it’s not-yet-Spring, the inside of our house was a brisk 55 degrees. Jesse was crying because he was cold, and he wanted crackers, and, most of all, a nap. (Although of course he never asks for a nap even though it is the thing he desperately wants and needs, I just have to know that for him because moms always do - a parallel to my own intransigence that probably needs an essay of its own one day.)
I have to tell you - it is very hard to concentrate on anything when your back is braced against the seemingly endless winter wind and your fingers are stiff and bloodless and a baby is wailing at you and wiping his snotty nose on your pants.
But we recovered. I got us each a snack, and Jesse tucked in his cozy bed. He was all snuffly and quiet and rubbing his face on his blankets and going “mmmm mmmmmm” - I had to restrain myself from picking him back up to kiss him, because he just looked so warm and sweet and tired.
My maternal urge resisted, I came back out into the living room to build a fire and return feeling to my digits. We almost exclusively use wood heat in our home, because my husband is outdoorsy and likes to handle firewood and chop down trees. Also, we live in a place where wood is abundant and cheap or free, and electric heat is both unsatisfying and expensive.
Here’s my little soapbox, but I just must tell you - there’s something sterile and removed about all-encompassing electric heat. It just comes out of vents in the floor and the house is warmed? I know I sound like I just plopped into this century from another, but honestly.
There’s no place for the drying of mittens or the warming of little cold hands, there’s no where to thaw out slushy boots or warm up your bum after chores of an evening. Electric heat doesn’t smell like anything, it doesn’t get warmer or cooler, it raises the temperature to exactly what you set the thermostat to, not a degree more or less. You can’t say, it’s a chilly night let’s put on some juniper, or get your heart warmed by the sight of smoke rising from the chimney as you come home in frosty blue-jean dusk, knowing that someone is literally keeping the home-fire burning, awaiting your cold and lonesome being.
There’s also something to be said for building the fire. I have built fires all my life and every time I thrill to see the flames come licking up the scrap of paper, the grocery list or last week’s movie times or the farm store ad. Then it comes up and tickles the edge of a sliver of wood, a scrap of bark, a pinecone, a shard of a larger log. Once it has hungered over the small things it leaps to bigger ones, growing and climbing and crackling with joy.
At this point you feel it - it warms your face and you smell the sap and the clean forest smell and it says to you: I will burn here and my dancing light with cheer you and my energy will warm you - go on, walk away and I will merrily consume all that you’ve put in the fire-box. That is why you made me. That is why I’m here.
I think that building fires keeps me humble and grounded. Fire is about survival, not status or glory. Fire is the act of keeping nature in its place, of clearing the underbrush and containing energy. It is a way of seeing the world as hostile and deadly and yet, still, even here in this desolate place - we light fires because life is not so easily dissuaded, because we believe against all odds that this is a place we can yet be warm and safe.
I’m reminded that my ancestors built fires out of hunks of peat, and my grandfather built a fire and rested his corduroy slippers by it in comfort, humming indiscernable jazzy tunes to himself, and my dad taught me to build a fire by stacking wood in a pile from small to large, and my husband spends a couple of hours a week using his big hands and broad shoulders to make fires possible, teaching his sons and daughter to use hatchets because one day they will also harness the woods for warmth. I’m one of a long line of mortals, some beautiful and some imaginative and some bossy and some incorrigible and some very boring indeed. But no matter what kind of person they were, all people have been harnessing fire for many generations, and I am no different. I have not evolved past fire, my silly concerns about vain things are actually not as important as this primal job, the act of setting fire so that what was dead may bring new life, what was discarded might be reused, what was cold might warm again, and what was small and foolish might create comfort in the midst of external froth and bluster.
I’m reminded, as I set match to tinder: some sparks are worth blowing on.
You'll be glad to know that US boy scouts can get a Merit Badge for fire-building.
I saw one test, and the first stage was using a match. Kids don't know how to use matches these days.
Ah yes! We heated with wood for 30+ years. It’s all that you say. Loved the fall routine of cutting wood, splitting logs. Stacking. The kids would bring in wood before school. Now we have a gas fireplace. Easier but…miss the crackling (real) fire!