The Joy of Fire

 One of the joys - and luxuries - of coming to The Ranch is building a fire.

A fire-based heating system does not make sense for us in New Home - the house is simply not set up to accommodate such a thing (the actual hearth, as with most newer housea, being buried back in the corner of the family room where it will heat nothing and in our case, also plumbed for natural gas), and we have no ready supply of wood.  The fact that houses were built so long after the actual availability of such a thing on regular basis brings to mind how fundamental the idea of a "hearth" and heating around a central location is, even if (as it true of our home) it is neither feasible nor practical.

At The Ranch, of course, it is another matter.

In one sense the house was not laid out any better in that it while the woodstove is elevated and in the living room, which is the central living area, there is an entire subside of the house (the bedrooms) that will not be heated as they are down a hallway - but, as I suspect was done in the older times, one assumes that quilts and blankets will be sufficient for that (especially if there is no back up heating source, which is happily not true here).  But within the main living space where my parents, and now I, spend most of my time, it is more than sufficient.

We are fortunate in that the supply for wood is (literally) all around us - just in fallen and dead trees (not accounting for those the power company takes down out of an abundance of caution for power lines), we have enough wood to last into my grandchildren's time - not accounting for any forestry management, of course.  It needs only be cut and stacked - which even up to the end, was one of the few hobbies and activities my father still maintained. 

Perhaps that is why it still has such a place in my heart.

The house has natural gas for heating, so it is by no means required that I build a fire at all, although for years that is exactly all my father did (in a sign of change, in the Winter leading up to last December, he would use the heating system, which was unusual).  For something like over twenty years, heating here throughout the Winter was pretty much based on the wood stove.

So I do not have to use fire when I am here.  But I do anyway.

Fire - not just fire itself but the process of building and maintaining it - is a joy.  There is a sense of accomplishment when one takes paper, kindlin' (if you have heard the word only as "kindling", it is not so spoken among us lower class rural folks), and wood and using a single match or one touch of the lighter, create a fire.  I am not 100% there yet, but I am getting better even with my infrequent visits.  It also is a talent to be able to maintain a fire for days on end, something which I am actually not bad at - the fire I started Saturday night upon my arrival will go until I leave again on the following Saturday. 

Everything about a home fire is, in a sense, a victory.

And once it is going, it continues to bring joy.  Fire will speak if you listen to them:  the quiet crackle and "whoosh" of the flames when the damper is fully open, the much more restrained noise but slowly rolling flames when the damper is closed and the flames burn almost in slowly motion, quietly rolling out and over the wood and onto the top of the firebox.  Visually, the fire is alight not with the rather unfortunate popular version of fire - red, orange, yellow - but with a thousand permutations of these, adding in blue and purple hints.  The smell, when one opens the door, can be as varied as smoke (early on) to the smell of heat (it has an indefinable scent) to the light puffiness of ash that lodges in the nostrils when shoveling out the ashes.

And heat, of course - in all ways but taste, fire and its heat fill the senses in a way that any other kind of heat never does.

Finally - although it is not a huge matter of concern - building a fire simply sings to me of provision.  The wood is from this land.  If the power goes off, at least for heat (and tea and coffee and even food in a pinch), I am provided for. Fire gives the soul a sense of freedom that being completely dependent on a company or industry for such things will never give.

In that sense, every time I am hear I do not build a fire out of need or perhaps even fully out of want. I build it out of joy - the joy the fire brings my senses and the joy that being in some small way free of a system that so often seems to encourage dependency, not independence.