It is Christmas evening… a cold night (at least for us in the land of no snow and orange trees) There will be frost on the roof tops tomorrow… I will leave the Christmas lights in the orange tree on tonight (big C-9 bulbs… inefficient heat generating bulbs… my anti freezing plan)
The others have gone to bed…
There is a fire burning on the hearth… It has been burning for the last 4 days… dying back overnight… but with more wood, and maybe a bit of kindling it will burst back into flame again each morning… It will burn all night… I will add more wood tomorrow morning… If Tina and I were home tomorrow night I would stoke it again, and it would continue to burn… in the past I have kept the fire alive for as long as 3 weeks at a time…
It creates warmth… not just a higher temperature as measured by a thermometer… but it makes the home warmer… The fire is alive… it glows…
Some years ago in spring, or maybe early summer, a friend, from Maine told me his mother, still in Maine… “Had let the fire go out…” I realize that this wasn’t an unintentional result of lack of maintenance… but a statement… A deliberate act… winter was over… and she could choose to let the fire die…
Now fires, fires in a fire place… real wood fires (gas logs don’t count…) are uncommon and occasionally illegal… At least in urban northern California… they contribute to air pollution… A maker of “fire place logs” aka fake wood, pressed wood, (they don’t count either) has commercials about limiting pollution from fires… and instead, when fires are legal, we should use their pressed wood imitation fire wood… a log wrapped on paper… traditional wood fires are under siege…
We “did” a program for 3 year olds at the farm earlier this month… I built a fire in the wood stove in the granary… our public space… to heat the space… to make it warm for 3 year olds and parents… Many of the three year olds were awe struck… a parent said… “He has never seen a real fire…” I believe that it was a revelation for her… But, we are fast losing the relationship between fire and warmth…
One local TV station offers a Yule Log program… tune (tuning a TV or radio is probably a forgotten idea as well) in to the picture of the burning log… Christmas songs playing… It’s almost as good as a fire… or not.
A well maintained wood fire in a masonry fireplace (not the tin things that house gas logs) while not efficient can warm… beyond the light, the smell and the bit of heat… they warm the heavy masonry mass… a giant heat battery.
There is more to it… the gathering and splitting of fire wood… the storing of the wood… staging it for the fire place… This is more than a thermostat… it requires one to think about how one could heat his house… how to maintain the fire…
I am not a Luddite… I really heat my home with a “modern” gas heater… but I still know how to heat with wood… and occasionally do… I know that fire is not always dangerous and can be a friend… I sit here blogging, on my laptop, by the fire… A fire I value.
In our modern world we are far removed from the need for fire to heat our house… But fire, elemental, visceral can still warm us in many ways… Its Abbey’s beer can again.
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