In the middle of my living room is a large fireplace. It’s made of bricks and stone, mortar and sweat. Next to the fireplace there’s a basket of sorts, a large wooden container that spiders like to web behind, between the stone and the wood. In the container is the cut and split wood, the firewood. It’s oak and maple and sometimes ash. Increasingly, ash. Opposite the wood is the axe. It’s a handsome axe, a big axe, and it’s worn and dented and scratched. I see this fireplace and this pile of wood and these spider webs and that axe every single day. I see these items in the morning and again at night. In time, my dear fire friends, in time.
And that time will come, but it won’t be here soon. It’ll be here in October, late October, on that first Saturday when the sky turns dull and dark, when the rain spits and a lonesome walker can see her breath outside for the first time since April. On that day, the wood will be stacked in the stone fireplace, a match will be lit, and the fireplace will crackle and roar to life. Then the process will repeat, not during an Indian Summer, but during the later months, those cold November afternoons and the still snow of early December. The fireplace for now is decoration, but then it will be for heat, for moods and for satisfaction and for passing the time.
It’s been summer for a while now. Summer blossomed in May and then it stuck during June, then July and now August, too. June wasn’t like June, and July was like July. August, well for a while it’s been feeling like too much. How many times can I sweat through a Wednesday shirt before I say that it’s all too much? The summer has been here and the summer will stay here, and for the rest of August we’ll sweat and then we’ll swim and then we’ll swim and soon after we’ll sweat. September will be the same. The summer that came early will stay late, and we’ll all be happy for it and yet, deep down inside, we’ll all think a little about football and a little about leaves and a little about how nice it will be to wear jeans without feeling suffocated by the denim.
This is what it’s like to live here. To live in this place where our summer is summer and our fall is fall and when winter comes, it’ll be winter. Imagine a life where summer was summer and fall was summer and winter was summer. Spring? Summer. The excitement of it all would be lost on us then, when we wish for the days when 98 might be 82, so we can wear our light jacket to dinner. What a boring life it would be to live where the seasons are the same. The people who live like that tell us how great it is. They mock our winter. You have a little something on your hat, and on your boots, they say. They’ll think they’re being funny, that they’re better than us because their sunburn is the same in December as it is in June.
I lived for a while where I thought that might be nice, to ignore winter and spend the season in some other summer. But today, in the middle of a most righteous summer I think of how much I love the sun and the waves and the breeze in the trees, but I also love my fireplace, and that stack of wood.