An Elegy For Our Fireplace
When my father built a home for our family in the hills of Alabama he put a large wood stove in the very centre. A good fire in that stove could heat the entire house, upstairs and down, for most of the night. I grew up splitting logs and carrying them in, building fires and learning to finesse small sparks into roaring warmth. They say firewood warms you twice, and it’s true—first when you cut it, and again when you burn it. The sound of our fire sucking air through the stove vents like breath, the crackling wood, the reassuring smoke from the chimney as I headed in from the winter cold—all are essential pieces of my childhood, baked into my soul by the power of the flames.
When my wife and I moved to Ireland, we lived in a house with a fireplace in the sitting room. It was smaller than the stove in Alabama, but the fire was open so we had the advantage of being able to enjoy the mysterious, mesmerising beauty that the stove doors used to hide from me. There is nothing in the world like an open fire—wood, coal, turf, it doesn’t matter. It is pure power—light and heat and ravenous appetite, warmth and comfort and danger. Its power is the reason fire has always been found at the centre of all types of human homes throughout history, from huts and yurts and cottages to palatial manors with their chimneys by the dozen. Until now.
The house we live in now is too modern for such things. Too efficient. We still have a mantlepiece, but inside its deceiving frame is an electric heater unit with fake coal that glows an unconvincing and decidedly unmagical orange. There is no mystery in our hearth, no raw, magnetic power blazing at the centre of our home attracting our gaze and warming our souls. Oh yes, our bodies are kept warm effectively—and without the hassle of shovelling coal and clearing ashes—for just as long as the wires connect us to the power station and the power station keeps up with all the little fireless homes and offices and factories.
Do you know how God chose to appear to Moses? In a burning bush. Pure, undefinable, unadulterated power, light, heat, comfort, danger.
My life is more convenient now. Less messy. There is no soot, no coal dust or logs to bring in from the cold. This is called progress, and I should be thankful for a warm place to live. And I am.
I just miss the fire.
