"We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbours, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the manner in which we and the world meet each new day." ~ Jack Gilbert Collected Poems
The mornings are foggy now and it takes longer and longer to burn off the mist. Crisp autumn apples are falling from the trees. It is fascinating to pick them up off the ground and see the interesting and intricate patterns insects have traced through the skin. The skies, now, are often vaporous and clouds of different sorts inhabit the sky at the same time; all of them scudding across the horizon.
Over the last few weeks we have seen heaps of firewood piled in neighbour's lanes and yards, waiting for the rhythm and order of stacking. I always feel drawn to touch the cut faces of the logs. To bend over and inhale deeply from their torn barks. To run my fingers over the delicately coloured veins of their exposed hearts - the lines that tell their life stories.
Now, on our walks, we smell wood smoke. Sometimes it is a sweet smell, as when burning apple wood. Sometimes the smell pinches at your nose - the acrid smoke of birch or pine. Sometimes the smell reminds me of the tobaccos my father smoked in his pipes. A smell that still, when I sense it, makes me turn and expect to see him. Though he is gone now.
When I see the smoke coiling in loops and ringlets up from stone chimneys, I inhale large, wanting to pull the smoke deep into my lungs; to have the warm haze of it curl at the bottom of my gut. I long for my hair to smell of it so that another, lover, can draw in the heated and poignant extinction of a blazed life.
Humans are drawn innately to a wood fire. It probably stems from our ancient beginnings and the fire that kept us safe and warm and predators at bay. Good grief, there is even a TV channel that shows nothing but a burning fire all day long, with a human arm occasionally reaching in to change the position of the log. People turn that channel on at Thanksgiving and Christmas time - the times that we gather together.
What it comes down to is that we want that capering flame and the sound of crackling fire. We want that lingering, smouldering smoke smell in our clothing and our hair. It goes well with a glass of full-bodied red wine. And perhaps a cat forming his body to our lap.
We don't ourselves, at Fat Hummingbird Farm, have a wood-burning stove. Two of them were removed from the house when it was renovated prior to our buying it. Nonetheless, there is a space that has been left in case we decide we want one. When I smell the smoke that drifts in the air from the wood stoves of others up and down our road, I think perhaps a wood-burning stove may come to live with us. And then I can watch those lives etched on the log faces, burn and blur and become souls.
The scent of fresh wood
is among the last things you will forget
when the veil falls.
The scent of fresh white wood
in the spring sap time:
as though life itself walked by you,
with dew in its hair.
That sweet and naked smell
kneeling woman-soft and blond
in the silence inside you,
using your bones for
a willow flute.
With the hard frost beneath your tongue
you look for fire to light a word,
and know, mild as southern wind in the mind,
there is still one thing in the world
you can trust.
~ Hans Børli in Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way by Lars Mytting
Comments