Pictures of families lounging before their fireplaces, mesmerized by the dancing flames always made me envious. “So get one for us, Dear,” my wife suggested . So I did.
I knew I’d have to feed my new fireplace with wood, but thought I had almost a cordsworth of scrap lumber lying around my workbench and there were the fallen branches that’d been cluttering our yard since last year’s big storm.
(“That storm was three years ago, Dear”, my wife just reminded me. I wish she wouldn’t look over my shoulder while I was blogging.”)
Anyway, I gathered and loaded the flotsam on a sturdy oak rack I’d built and thought it looked like a month’s worth of fireplace fodder. One Saturday afternoon I struck the very first match while the family stood by expectantly, some brandishing long forks loaded with marshmallows.
Three hours later I discovered I’d burned all the flotsam and tinder, including my new oak rack. And I was exhausted. It was like being the only stoker on an endangered steam boat caught in a typhoon.
All my spare time since then has been devoted to gathering fuel to appease the appetite of my hungry hearth and to avoid the budget-breaking price of store-bought firewood.
I decided to prune my trees, something they’d needed for years. I lopped off dead branches and removed others that were invading neighbors’ clotheslines and decks. I admit I was overzealous. It took a concerned neighbor to point that out.
“You #%!* idiot!”, he shouted, “Don’t you know it’s almost midnight?”
He was right, of course. High level chainsaw tree-trimming should be done in daylight so you can occasionally count your fingers and also see where you’re falling.
I had a system. First I cut off the dead limbs, then the probably and possibly unhealthy ones. As my gardening books suggested, I chainsawed the “interfering branches”, the “narrow joints”, the “crowding structures” and anything that disrupted the “clean tree contour”.
My wood pile runneth over, but my yard looked like a training camp for a power company’s pole climbers. Each tree’s shadow was a narrow line across the lawn.
As the temperature dropped, the insatiable fireplace demanded more and more combustibles. I created excuses to condemn things to the flames. The picnic table was too rickety. The basketweave fence was obstructing our view of the neighbor’s garbage cans. Nothing was safe. Baseball bats, skis, my leaky rowboat, sagging bookshelves. My son refused to surrender his homemade stilts.
“This is madness!” I shouted one day when I realized I was wrenching off a porch railing. “What’s the good of having a fireplace if you don’t have time to enjoy it? I’m going to stop chopping and sit down in my inglenook!”
“Sit down?” my wife asked. “Sit down on what?”
Imagine That 