Trust me, it takes an awful lot more than a spark

Dawn broke in streaks of pink, gray, and yellow, illuminating the cold morning in a burst of splendor. I heard some early birds high in the trees, chickadees and bluejays and the chattering of a pileated woodpecker. I wondered whether it was the same woodpecker that flew just overhead yesterday afternoon, and I told myself I never would have experienced this if the fire in the wood-burner hadn't burned out last night.

I woke to a cold house and cool air blowing from the heat vents, my first clue that something was wrong with the wood-burner. I wanted to curl up with a blanket and a cup of hot oatmeal while the resident pyromaniac went outside to do his fire-starting magic, but, tragically, my husband was still in Jackson and unlikely to arrive home for hours. 

Which explains why I found myself standing in the predawn chill trying to restart a dead fire. There was still a big log in the firebox, but somehow it got lodged in oddly so it was tilted up away from the coals, which were dead cold.

Now my husband is a fire-starting genius, able to produce a raging fire with wet wood during a downpour. I, on the other hand, am not. You don't want to know how long it took me to get a real fire going this morning (two hours) or how many weeks' worth of newspapers I sacrificed to the process (too many) or how many times I decided to give it up after one more try--let's just see if this one takes.

It was a quiet morning, cold and clear, and as I watched the wadded-up newspapers flare up and then fail to ignite the kindling, I grew contemplative. How many literary figures have gained deep insights while gazing into a fire? Isabel Archer, sure, and some Dickens heroine--Florence Dombey maybe, or Esther Summerson? And what's the name of the gothic short story about a charcoal-tender who gazes too long into the flame? I'm thinking Hawthorne but I could be wrong. Maybe Poe? Too much thinking before breakfast--time to gather more little sticks to serve as kindling, and let's toss in a handful of dry pine needles while we're at it.

It only takes a spark to get a fire going promises the old campfire song, but that lyric leaves out some important caveats. One spark might be sufficient to get a fire going in a pile of dry straw, but all of our wood has been sitting outside in the cold and wet and frost--toss a spark at all of that and it'll just fizzle out. I tried different configurations of kindling, pine needles, and newspapers, left the woodbox door open so plenty of oxygen could get in, added an empty cardboard box to fuel the potential conflagration, and occasionally sparked a nice little flare-up of flame that consumed all the papers and needles but left the kindling cold.

Did I give up? I did not, even when the cold crept up through my gumboots and chilled me to the bone. I tended the reluctant fire as dawn broke and the sky shifted from black to gray to pink to blue, and finally, after my umpteen-millionth reconfiguration of kindling, something worked right and I was rewarded with the sight of smoke rising from the chimney.


I hadn't planned to spend two hours this morning proving my incompetence as a fire-starter, but we do what we have to do. If I hadn't been out there, I wouldn't have seen the sunrise or heard the woodpecker or stared so long into the reluctant flames that I came to believe that they were getting ready to offer me some deep insight into the mysteries of the universe.

But then the flames would die out and I would have to start all over again.