Making Fires

We've spent two winters in this house gazing at an empty fireplace.  The home inspector found a problem that my sweet husband tried to fix by filling some small gaps with material he later realized was smoke retardant and not fire retardant.  I finally had someone come out yesterday to assess the problem, and the solution was easy - apparently there wasn't even really a problem to begin with.*  So he helped me start the first fire we've ever had here and I was taken back in time.

I thought about my grandparents' home in rural Mississippi.  Their brick fireplace had no fancy gas starter so every fire was fun in the making.  We would bundle up and run outdoors to find kindling that always included twigs, finger sized sticks, pine needles and pine cones.  A stack of newspaper sat near the fireplace.  Once everything was neatly in place with crumpled paper and small twigs on the bottom and a couple of small logs on top, my Papa would pull a match from atop the mantle and with a strike and touch here and there to the crumpled paper a small orange glow would reflect from the brick.  The fire would quickly travel along the paper and ignite the twigs and pine cones.  

Before long a single match strike became a roaring fire that would heat the entire house.  We'd warm our numb-cold hands there when we came in from playing out in the cold.  We'd sit on the hearth before the fire's heat until our backs burned so hot we couldn't bear it any longer and had to move.  We'd feed pine cones to the flames just to watch them turn into bright glowing embers as they curled into themselves and quickly burned.

After the kids went to bed last night, Fred and I relaxed together in front of the fire.  Our fire needed a gas start  as we don't yet have any kindling to start it any other way.  But it felt warm and reminded me of those country fireplace fires so long ago, and all of those childhood memories** that float along with it. I can't wait to show my kids how a pine cone burns.

*Just in case you are worried about our safety, the gap is on the other side of the spark guard.  He advised we could fill it ourselves with regular attic insulation if  it made us feel better.

**The other memories deserve their own space, but the most obscure memory was that of a sound; the sound of a croquet balls rolling back and forth between two of us on the brick floor in the hallway.