Fire
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“I think,” I said, turning to James over the weekend as clouds of black smoke billowed out from behind me, “that we should call the fireplace guys.”
When they came last winter, just after James had closed on his house north of the city, the fireplace guys assured us that the fireplace was OK to use. This verdict was delivered with little ado. We had, they observed, a wood-stove insert—a fully contained wood-burning vessel placed within the structure of a pre-existing fireplace—which should require, their words, no maintenance. I installed smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors, procured a fire extinguisher, and built up a near-nightly habit of fire-building.
The fireplace guy who came this week was a different fireplace guy. He didn’t agree about either the maintenance requirements or the underlying fireworthiness of the apparatus. That’s more or less what we know. Someday we’ll have $2,000 sitting around to drop on a complete inspection, and ten times that to reengineer the chimney, or we will find a fireplace guy who is convincingly less risk-averse and/or cheaper. In the meantime, no fires.
I’d be heartbroken about this—that fireplace is an anchor—except that a few months ago we got a smokeless fire pit and set it on a small rise at the far side of James’s front yard. We would spin up the anti-mosquito machine, pair the Bluetooth speaker, ferry out a few plates’ worth of dinner, and sit outside until the black of night consumed us. (One night, a black bear nearly consumed us, or at least the garbage cans in the driveway. But we knew this only later, from security video.)
Drought restrictions interrupted this ritual in the fall. When it got cold enough, we started making fires back inside, but the airflow had become trickier and it was hard to keep them lit. We could have pushed ahead with the fire pit—it wasn’t clear that contained outdoor fires were strictly prohibited—but we didn’t want to be the ones to burn down the town, which has a highly active Facebook group where we’d have lived out our days in infamy (representative post, from Thursday: “Is someone missing a white bull dog? The bull dog is on Briar Patch lane”). That meant we also suspended use of the charcoal grill that I’d gotten for James’s birthday last spring, way back when we still thought a broken wrist counted as an existential disaster, and existential disasters could be palliated with a trip to Home Depot.
This last weekend, though—after the billowing smoke indoors, before the fireplace guy, and only a few hours ahead of the snowstorm that would turn everything to winter by morning—we sat by the fire pit as the last sun ceded an overcast sky, with our gloves and our glasses. We did some musing, as we do, about what the place would become. But the best thing about the fire is that by its light no improvements remain. Staring across it you can see a whole story in the dwindling day behind the westward trees, but it’s not a story of then. It’s a story of now. If anything else is to happen, it will not be in the lifetime of this fire.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com.