Spirits of the Fire

The day before Thanksgiving is bitterly cold and still damp from the last few days of winter rain.  It's the kind of weather that creeps undetected into your bones and settles like wet dirt - clingy and unseen, impossible to shake off - it calls up memories of New England during the nasty season.  You can't bundle up enough to ward it off and in my house I can feel it, slithering under door frames and around the window sills, inching its way down from the attic and seeping up from beneath the floors.  It penetrates the walls of this little hundred year old house and there's no place to hide unless I stay in bed - an obvious impracticality - or turn the heat up to 80 - an obvious extravagance - so I slip into my thermals and pull on thick socks, layer to the point of immobility and then crawl under a blanket.  The small brown dog gives me a pleading look and I leave my little nest to find her a sweater then together we burrow back in.

We shall stay here 'til spring, I tell her and she looks at me as if it's my fault.  The little dachshund crawls up next to her and arranges his small body to shield her and share his warmth.  Soon the couch is so full of animals that I can barely move, even the kitten finds a niche and curls up into a tight ball on my shoulder. Never one to follow the crowd, the black dog, thick coated and tough as old boots, takes a chair across from the couch and assumes a posture of watchfulness.  She lays her head on her paws, listening for any sound from inside or out, always on the edge of ready-set-go and untroubled by the cold.  There are times I envy her.

This is fireplace weather, I think, remembering New England.  Most everyone had one with a brick hearth and a painted mantle - a fire was a welcoming sight to come to on those cold winter evenings - the dogs would sigh and stretch out before it and Nana would make hot chocolate just before bedtime.  She served it in tiny white china cups, sweet and frothy with whipped cream and sometimes my daddy would help us toast marshmallows on skinny green sticks.  The flames would crackle in a blaze of color - red, blue, and yellow incandescence against the sooty bricks - sometimes they would snap like sharp twigs and send showers of bright, hot sparks up the chimney.  The sweet, smoky smell filled the room and when there were only embers and ashes left, the glow was hypnotizing.  I imagined I could see shapes and faces as the last logs burned down, eyes peered back at me and I thought of wolves and owls, vampires and bloodless, white-faced night creatures out of Grimm's Fairy Tales.  Spirits of the fire, come to purify and cleanse and make everything new again.  Some nights they even followed me up the stairs and made their way into my dreams where my imagination never did seem to call forth sweet spirits.  It seemed to prefer the darker, horror-tinged apparitions, usually there to do do my bidding but sometimes turning on me with bloody fangs and talon-like nails.  Every branch scratching on my window, every howl of winter wind, every flicker of wicked flame seemed to call me - I dared not think to what purpose - some dreams are like a runaway team of horses, too powerful to stop, too wild to be reined in, better to go along for the ride and hope you aren't rudely thrown off.

I still have a fireplace - gas fueled with sad, sorry imitation logs, not much to inspire the imagination and not meant to - it's efficient and quietly contained, its flames hiss steadily but it offers no magic and makes no memories.

How dull it is to be grown up.