Fire
Funny really, how a house fire can trigger a racing heart with just a single birthday candle.
It wasn’t a candle, but a spark from an overextended circuit through tired knob and tube during a Polar Vortex in Smalltown, Ohio. Like a game of ‘catch me if you can,’ it peeked at us from the roof as we shivered in blankets next to neighbors on the curb, then it licked each window frame from attic to basement. Inside, it left everything we owned or had borrowed burnt, black, wet, frozen, and putrid. When the house finally stood gutted, we conceded to the reflection; we were all empty, barren, broken. I banned open flames, just on principle.
Seven years and another lifetime later, you can find me most of these winter days in Upstate New York crouched in front of a wood-burning stove. Carefully, I crush newspaper, snap twigs, stack pine and cedar logs, not too large, not too weak. Throughout the day, I tend, feed, and care for this fire like a runt pup. Later, I sit in the dark to watch the flames bounce to their brief rhythm of survival and smell their scent of cremation. Those hundreds of year old trees once guarded this home as they also tended, fed, and cared for, the earth beneath them. That’s when I can remember, the fire-pit surrounded by high school friends sharing cigarettes and cheap merlot, and the campfires holding drowsy toddlers who smell like sweat and dirt. That’s when I remember the smell of lilac candles around a bubble bath and the whiff of smoldering coals from a pot-bellied stove in a long-ago lover’s cabin. And, all of those birthday candles for babies to Bubbes. All of that joy in the middle of those four walls.
I still remember the house fire and most of what it stole, but gone are the fear and the longing for all of the ‘whats’ that it destroyed. The lesson unfolded cautiously. It whispered to me in warm tones. I, too, can build again, begin again. I, too, can find solace where once angst lived.
