The Morning Fire Ritual
by Chase Parnell — December 16, 2024
I set two alarms, three minutes apart. I rise after the second and tip-toe down the hallway to the kitchen on creaking wooden floorboards. Every noise is like breaking glass in a sleeping home. I flip on the burner and fill the kettle, taking stock of two things. How much time do I have before I need to start my run and how cold is the house. I pass over cold white tiles under the soft glow of Christmas lights to the french doors that open to our very basic but nicely private rectangular backyard. On the counter next to the door we have an electronic thermostat. The display gives me hard data: the actual temperature in the house and the temperature outside.
In December, every morning is a fire morning. No question about it. The intrigue is in how low the temperature in the house fell the night before. How much ground will the fire have to make up to create a comfortable home? If the internal temperature reads above 60 degrees, it feels like a letdown. Not that cold. I like it when it’s in the 50s because we’re really going to accomplish something here.
I flip on the porch light to illuminate the darkness. The word porch actually misrepresents what we have; it’s more of a cracked cement slab with a carve out for a tall slender juniper whose roots damage the porch a little more each year. The shape of the platform is again rectangular. I always think I’m going to see a cat or a raccoon or a home invader scatter when I flip the light switch, casting a horror of shadows across the lawn. I slip my cold feet into man slippers and unlock the french door quietly. The click of the deadbolt is always louder than I want. I do not want to hear any stirrings from the rooms.
The bucket where I keep the kindling sits right outside the door and is empty about half the time. I tell myself I need to cut some wood tonight. I likely won’t. Nothing but wood chips remain along the siding of the house where until recently there was a solid pile of quartered wood rounds. I haven’t kept it stocked so I have to make the trip across the frozen yard to where our winter supply lines the fence.
The goal is to grab an assortment of wood that will not give me too much trouble getting started in the fireplace. About half the wood is covered in tattered tarps to protect it from moisture. Wet wood is about as useful as a car with no engine. I lean over and pull some narrow juniper, its crackly paper bark lights well. I pull some mid-sized dried out and cleanly cut ponderosa pine, and then usually a larger hunk that gave me issues when splitting, thinking I’ll toss it on after I have the rest of the wood burning nicely. Lastly, I grab on a couple slices of bark whose sappy crevices will easily ignite. The bark is a substitute for the good kindling that my bucket should’ve been full of. I’ll pay for this in caked creosote up the chimney walls.
All of this wood needs to fit in the crook of my arm as I walk back to the house, open the door, navigate around the dinner table chairs and into the family room where our fireplace rests. On rare occasion I drop a log and shake the house. If I cuss before 8am, that’s the reason.
Firewood is the home of multitudes. Ear wigs, potato bugs, spiders of all shapes and sizes, critter nests and sap. Because I can’t see anything in the dark when collecting, I always imagine spiders crawling out of the wood and up my sleeves as I crunch across the yard. I’m relieved when I get the wood out of my arms to rest on the elevated brick hearth where the stove sits. I brush off my flanneled sleeves and chest to get rid of any crawlers that were never there.
I reach down to the fireplace door handle, pull it to the left to unlatch, and open it slowly. The slower I go the quieter the wild song of the cast iron hinge. I look inside and see weeks of ash that I swore I was going to clean out yesterday. To the left of the fireplace sits a white can full of newspaper and brown paper bags. I need four to five crumpled pieces of newspaper or a brown paper bag and two pieces of newspaper. With that foundation, I lay the slim juniper, then the bark, then the mid-sized pine. I leave the hunk of oddly shaped gnarl for later.
The goal is usually to get the fire lit before the kettle starts to shriek. I smear a match along the box and light three or four places of last month’s news. There are certain articles and faces I enjoy watching go up in flames. Maybe once a month I find a story and spare it for later reading. I hear the mounting crescendo of boiling water and make a dash for the kitchen to click off the stove top, leaving the fireplace door open to give the young fire all the oxygen it needs to get going. Three scoops of ground coffee into the french press. I grab my oat milk, Nikki’s toffee nut latte creamer, and scan the cupboard for mugs we like. I won’t rummage around too much; clanking glasses make me cringe.
I place all the coffee stuff on the coffee table and make a place for me to sit there too. I take a minute or two to watch the flames. Maybe nine out of ten fires I check in with and know it’ll make it without any supplemental newspaper. If it rained or snowed the night before, the inevitable moisture on the wood causes problems and makes me chafe. I watch the flames wave and lick, dance and connect, die down and rage up. It’s feeding on the stored energy in the wood; it consumes it noisily. Snaps and pops and melted sap dribbling and hissing. When I’m certain the fire will hold I ease the door shut and latch it secure. Now it’s the fireplace’s turn to vocalize. It creaks and ticks and settles. You can feel the force of the fire pushing on its insides. I love to watch it when the fire is really ripping, conjuring images of an old coal-fired steam engine train. You can feel the power.
I move to the couch and slowly push the filter through the french press cylinder, pour, and savor that first sip. I think about how my parents gave me the newspaper for starter, my in-laws the old juniper that had been drying for many years in their backyard. Then the more freshly cut pine that we got from family friends; they had a tree in their yard removed and set aside the wood for us instead of having it hauled away. At a market price of $200 a cord, all combined, they probably saved us $400. I acknowledge and appreciate how even little things like accumulating a winter’s worth of firewood can bring us all together.
Usually after my first cup and about 10 pages of reading, I get up and add the larger gnarled piece that will sustain the fire for a few hours and warm the house for Nikki and the kids to enjoy once they emerge. Although a small chore, there is some satisfaction in being the provider of heat for my family. This was a far greater accomplishment for early humans, when hunting and gathering and making fire were the bedrock of survival. With modern technology and a multitude of grocery stores just down the road, my daily practice of making a fire for heat might be my closest connection to generations past. I spent the first 32 years of my life in homes that heated themselves. But then we moved into this humble house in Bend, built in the 1960s. It’s the spitting image of a shipping container, but it had a wood stove and now I can’t imagine living without one.
There’s something powerful about doing something every day. Sure, at times I feel like I’m just going through the motions, but I honestly feel that going outside to gather the wood, assembling it in the stove, lighting the match, and watching it rage; this adds value to my life experience. It starts my day with an accomplishment. Creating warmth satisfies in a way that a button on a wall never will.
Not to get too sappy here, but I can’t help but analogize the intimacy of the daily fire with that of the daily run. With certain things in life, developing fluency and personal connections with a pursuit can only be done by repetition. I’ve seen many people come into running, they do it for a few years out of sheer will and determination, but if that subtle appreciation and consistent satisfaction doesn’t materialize, you aren’t going to be around for very long. The novelty of the runner’s high or building the perfect fire wears off.
But really, isn’t that the beauty of life? Each day we wake up and go about our day we open ourselves up to new possibilities. Not everything we do is going to take. A thousand people might walk by the art gallery in downtown Bend and see the same painting through the window. 999 of them will not take a second glance, but one will. One will be stopped in their tracks and have their life turn upside down by it. Their life trajectory might forever change because the work opened up something new inside of them.
By the end of our lives, we are the amalgamation of all the things that took, that stopped us in our tracks and provided that slow trickle of joy. After millions of exposures to different hobbies, music styles, crafts, foreign languages, travel opportunities, food experiences; a quick tour around anyone’s home and you’ll see what moved them. I wish I was more of a handyman, I wish I found satisfaction in fixing and building, I wish I could play an instrument, I wish I could draw or paint; but at a certain point you have to stop fighting what you aren’t and let your nature tell you what you are. Be open, allow yourself to be romanced, and see what lands.
I’m a runner, I’m a reader, I like to walk through nature and foreign streets, I enjoy the tick-tock of mechanical clocks, and I’ll even say that I have a relationship with cooking and growing food, albeit a fledging one. I write although I still don’t know if I’m a writer or if I’m forcing it. I’m definitely a fireplace guy. I love the daily ritual and I want a stove in my home indefinitely.
Each piece of wood that gets tossed into the fire rises in temperature until it ignites. Then it burns with increasing fury until it reaches its peak and starts the downward turn on the bell curve. We as humans experience this same life cycle. The key difference, however, it that some types of wood burn hot and long and some burn weak and short. I don’t know about you, but I want the life of a hardwood, burning hot, releasing whatever energy I have into the world for as long as possible. Find those things that stoke your flame, that soak you full of energy, and chase them everyday.
One day, our lives will run their course. We’ll burn up and be nothing more than a pile of ash. But the heat we put out in life will warm those around us and be remembered as it radiates through time. Even that though will fade until the cold silence prevails and we’re left with nothing more than a hope in the afterlife and a passing of the torch to our children and future generations.
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