Simple Delight
A reflection on the pleasure fire brings (after Ross Gay).
Simon, a student in the nonfiction writing class I’m teaching this fall, recently shared an essay with the group that provides a kind of template/invitation, especially for writers. The excerpted essay, The Book of (More) Delights, lists a few simple things that the author, Ross Gay, takes “delight” in.
With the onset of fall and impending winter, here is something I take delight in:
The creaking sounds of expanding metal as the still-cold, steel wood stove in my Adirondack cabin warms, the glass door left cracked to let in enough air to feed those first flames, the first heat only coming through that glass door then slowly emanating from the thick steel sides and top, from the chimney pipe itself that reaches up some 20 feet to where it exits through the high ceiling, the heat slowly pushing into every corner as layers of clothing are shed, windows cracked, the occasional bite of a sharp-cold inhalation of outside air.
How this always brings me to other fires, the multitude of fires I’ve tended in wood stoves and pellet stoves and fireplaces from Vermont to Massachusetts, Maine and Michigan, New York, Connecticut. How I love central heat sources you can cozy up to in winter-cold and hang wet socks and gloves in front of, and how the cats and dogs will circle round spreading out on the warmed floor boards. And how the flames’ flight pull us in, silences us, gives us pause, allows us to fall deeply inside ourselves.
At the cabin’s outdoor fireplace, a few chairs in front of it, an old cedar stump fashioned into a side table, you can smell the smoke of it too when a breeze pushes it your way. Or follow the red-spark-glow of tiny embers floating upward toward the infinite crystal-spark-glow of stars—so many more of them there in those dark, Adirondack skies that act the way skies used to before we flooded the world with false light.
In Connecticut my soapstone wood stove behaves differently, its 4-inch thick stones heating ever-so-slowly, the fire inside seeming mere mirage. Until an hour or so on, and its soft heat reaches out and takes hold, wrapping around you, a warming that seems to come from someplace inside you, not from the exterior thing, the big bright fire pushing hard against glass and stone. It is a kind of drug, a soothing, an unraveling coming from those once mobile and unsettled grains of silt and sand now pressed through centuries of earth-force into a solid mass.
Soapstone’s Wikipedia description almost seems a poem itself: “It is produced by dynamothermal metamorphism and metasomatism, which occur in subduction zones, changing rocks by heat and pressure, with influx of fluids but without melting.” “Metasomatism” comes from the Greek meta (change) and soma (body), which speaks to the way “the minerals which compose the rocks are dissolved and new mineral formations are deposited in their place.” And as I sit beside my old soapstone stove, I too feel a deep change under tremendous, unfathomable forces, something inside of me being replaced by something else, my body itself changed, changing.
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Love a good fire. You’ve reminded me of the delight in Ross Gay’s book too!