Tall pine reduced to ash. Not without a final grand gesture. The teepee of material we used to capture the right amount of oxygen and heat sits atop a small bed of needles and birch bark kindling. Long ago before I become this good at making a fire, I'd use paper to start the fire. In fact, often I'd have to keep shoving paper into the bottom of the fire to keep it burning. I was a novice fire starter. No more, I'm part of this forest.
The flames reach a crescendo of dancing, blazing higher higher and higher. The bark of one of the logs has separated ever so slightly, the gap keeps widening. Heat pushes it further and further up in the air, threatening it to leave the log. Small flames lick up and under the bark. I imagine the flames rising underneath it, lifting and floating it into the sky. It would hover above me like a lantern, floating until it melded with the stars - who are always worshiping the moon.
My knees are burning, my back is cold. I want to rotate, but I'm stuck here looking deeper. It's mesmerizing. As a child, we almost always had a fireplace. The years past and a TV was brought into the house, now when I return for the holidays, a blazing fire is played on the screen. It's not the same, and it makes me laugh - in a childlike manner - for fire, is still a delight.
There is a fundamental draw of men to fire. Ancient cave drawings show men killing deer, antelope and buffalo. The stick figures slowly raise their spears and plunge them deep into the animals, providing sustenance for their families through the winter. Those drawings flicker in the fire light on the cave walls as the first motion pictures. I burn the rubber off the soles of my boots, being as close to the fire as possible without falling in.
The smoke burns my eyes. "I hate white rabbits" I choke out - in a strange statement that is suppose to ward off the smoke from my direction. I get up and hang the kettle for coffee over the flames. Tonight I write by this light, barely able to visualize the straggling sentence of redemption scrawling across the page in a downward slope.
Ash, coals, branches and logs layer upon layer make this fire burn. Many years of fires have been burned here, each providing a return of the pines to the ground. I just found out my sister-in-law has cancer. It swirls and smokes the conversation tonight. It makes me choke on the intensity. She's too young. It's bullshit. A person is suppose to live a happy full life - somewhere in the unforeseeable future have to deal with concepts of pain, age, death. No now. Not with a beautiful child, who's just learning what it means to live. I wish she was one of these towering pines. I wish you all were. Your grand gestures would continue on forever. I'd use you to warm me. You all look so beautiful with the dancing light on your faces.
The coffee fills my brain with a love buzz. My tears don't quench the coals. They sizzle and pop telling me be happy for this warm moment. Have faith that pain is only the fire, breaking our metal down to liquid so we can be reformed into a stronger metal.
The colors of the rainbow can be seen as I look hypnotized by this fire. Black. White. Red. Orange. Yellow. Purple. Blue. Green sparks shoot away, threatening to light my papers on fire, I lean away and stare at the cool night sky. The fire reaches out to capture bits of fuel outside the ring I've bound it to. I've spent a long night arguing why we make fires in ring. Why not squares? Why not triangles?
My skin, hair and clothes take on this smokey nature perfume. The wind shifts, pulling the fire from its vertical flow to a horizontal slant. The sound is hollow and full. At the edge of one of the logs, a bit of sap drips down like lava.
Fire is not required for life. For centuries it has allowed us to consume more than we need. Cooking food, washing clothes, brewing beer, sterilizing the tools that will cut away this disease that threatens to take from us what it does not deserve to have. I'm angry and scared.
Close to the fire I feel safe. I slip into the edge of the woods for relief - gazing back at its warmth. I want to get back to the safe glow as soon as possible. It's an obsession that we have had as a human race, since the well documented dark ages, extending the day, warding of the spirits that threaten to pick us off one by one - when no one is looking. I howl at the moon. The wolves howl back. I love to hear them, as long as I know, they're at a comfortable distance and I have my fire.
And so it goes...
