Time Travel
It's real, you just need to find the portal. Mine is a roaring fire in a fireplace.
Last night, at approximately 7:03 PM Mountain Time, we officially slipped from summer to fall.
I love fall. I love it because the air is crisp and clean. That’s why I love trail running on snow packed trails, it is the sensation of virgin air breathed for the first time.
I also love the cold because I love campfires and wood burning fireplaces.
Wood heat is just different somehow. When I step into a room with a wood stove or fireplace fired up, it feels somehow... soft. I don’t know how else to describe it. There is nothing impersonal or disinterested about it, as with oil or gas, or worst of all, electric - no, wood heat seems alive, and possessed of a mellowed, welcoming touch. It wraps you in its loving arms and makes you feel like you belong.
Each time I return to the fireside, I find myself instinctively relaxing into its warm embrace – as if it is THIS feeling I have always sought.
The low angle of the sun is the harbinger of fall, and it always brings on a bout of melancholia and nostalgia in me. As summer surrenders to the autumnal equinox and the sun starts to sink low in the winter sky, the shadows grow longer, the light is muted, and the landscape begins exhibiting the dormancy of a winter’s sleep. Even at midday in a clear sky, Ole Sol gives little warmth as if it is keeping its heat for itself, preferring to bestow it to other planets that deserve it more than we do. It is the chill, drab feeling that comes from knowing that the warmth and renewal of the spring is so, so very far away.
But where there are negatives, there are always positives. Nature balances that way.
As the early chills of fall close in, my thoughts always return to how I grew up in rural North Mississippi. While we certainly had other means, we also had a lot of land and a lot of standing oak and hickory timber. We had a fireplace and a wood stove and used them almost exclusively during the winter for a main source of heat.
I have gas fireplaces in my house now, but I really miss the wood burner in our old Park City home. I already miss, as soon as it got cold enough, lighting that puppy up. The heat is softer; the flames are mesmerizing, and the smell of smoke evokes quite a few memories. I can remember how hot it was when we were out in the woods selecting the trees and then felling them (you always cut wood in the summer in order that it be properly cured dry by the time the cold comes). I can remember getting my first pole axe and being assigned “topping and trimming” duties to dispatch the small limbs so the adults with the chainsaws could cut the trunk and limbs into fireplace sized lengths unimpeded (I also remember going at that like a Viking raider invading northern Scotland).
I can remember my dad teaching me how to “read” a tree, to see which side had the heaviest branches and foliage because that is the natural way gravity would pull it. I remember graduating from topping duties and being taught to use a chainsaw to notch the trunk in the right place, to the right depth and how to make the cut on the opposite side in the right way – a tree can be “directed” by cutting around it and leaving some of the heart wood intact to “pull” it to that side as it falls. I remember being taught how to use a sledgehammer and wedges to force a tree to a tipping point where I wanted it to fall. I can remember being taught how to read the grain to make splitting easier. In the days before the splitting mauls and hydraulic splitters, we used axes (and in particularly difficult chunks, a sledge, and wedges). I learned that oak and hickory would split across its diameter but trees like the elm had to be “slabbed” or split tangentially. You had mastered the axe when you could split a log with one blow.
I remember the first signs of autumn as the red clay hills of north Mississippi were set ablaze in color by a non-consuming flame. I always saw God in the beauty unfolding before me, I felt as if I was living the experience of Moses in Exodus 3:2 – “And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.”
I remember the crunch of leaves, the smell of smoke in the air and the hunts for the “Chicken of the Trees” (squirrel) and the annual pilgrimage to take a buck or two for venison. I remember hog killin’ time. I remember stopping by and sitting on my grandparent’s front porch every morning before going to school, talking with my granddaddy and mammy about everything under the sun – from politics and the Progressive Farmer farm report presented by Mutual of Omaha on the AM radio to my grandmother’s gossip with (and often about) Miss Birdie Lou Haney on their party line.
But most of all, I remember family. I remember my uncles and cousins coming to help get in the winter’s wood – and in return, us going to help them. I remember how great the fireplace felt when the overnight frost decorated our windows in fractal patterns, the artwork of Nature and Nature’s God shining like diamonds in the morning sunrise. I remember the family sitting around the fireplace, often silent, just watching the dancing flames as the heat caressed and warmed our faces like a mother’s love. I remember a time that I thought was complicated but in retrospect, was blissfully simple. I remember those who have gone on to Glory – my mother and father, my grandparents, my uncles and aunts and the multitude of cousins.
I remember and miss all of them.
Staring into the fire, all of that is as real for me today as it was all those decades ago.
They say that time travel is not possible – but I wonder how that can be when in the time it takes to form a thought, I am transformed and transported through 63 years of life and nearly 40 years of wandering the world, to a 10-year-old boy in front of the roaring hearth of a Mississippi fireplace as the leaves rained down outside.
The psychology of a fireplace is evidently far deeper than I ever considered.
For me, it’s also an important connection with the warmth and goodness of my past.
Beautifully written. I can hardly wait for our first fire in our real fireplace. I'm thinking we better get lots of wood this year -- because the world is so terribly mismanaged that there may not be enough gas to heat our homes. I'd like to burn wood before I start burning the furniture!
Makes me nostalage as well. I had many of the same experiences. Biggest differences was we burned coal and spent most falls picking cotten.