I crouched by the firepit Sunday night cracking twigs into kindling and arranging them over some scrap paper that would’ve long since met its fate in a recycling bin—if such things existed in Lubbock. I sparked the lighter and coaxed a blaze into being; it didn’t take much prodding—the wood is dry in this desert city. I sat for a while watching the cheery crackling flames.
Why is tonight different from all other nights? This was my first solo fire (if you didn’t count Annie Dillard, whose essays I read in the flickering half-light). Memories of other fires—beautiful, ephemeral things surviving for an evening and flickering ever after across the mind’s eye only—leapt to the fore.
Cozy evening fires punctuated every season of my childhood. There were myriad visits to Grandma and Grandpa W.’s acreage, where we captured frogs and toads, quadded (ATV’d) through the woods, climbed trees, explored the bog, picked out Christmas trees, and almost always spent hours around the fire. When we were really little, the drive home was dark and quiet; we could scarcely keep our eyelids up, but it didn’t matter—there was nothing quite like being bundled snugly from car to house to bed in a parent’s arms.
The only fish I ever enjoyed eating was one we’d caught out at Grandma and Grandpa S.’s annual summer camping trip, watching the flames and the faces circling them and laughing at jokes I’ve long since forgotten. Afterward we’d relocate to the picnic table and play game after game of Wizard, each one punctuated by groans and laughter and well-worn wisecracks.
On New Year’s Eve we’d be treated to fires above and below. Clomping clumsily in our skates across the mismatched bits of carpet lining the impromptu path from the rink Dad and I flooded with a series of garden hoses linked together like a chain of Christmas lights to the community center shelter, we’d warm ourselves by the old iron stove. Between that cheery, warming blaze and the spectacular fireworks bursting above, there was no shortage of flame to delight the senses.
Later teenage New Year’s Eves found me laughing so hard it nearly hurt while country music issued from the wide-open quonset and the boys stood for minutes with their loose-jean-clad backsides nearly in the flames, then sat abruptly on damp wooden stumps—just to see who could most stoically handle the heat.
On the coldest, darkest, longest winter nights Dad would clear the previous night’s ashes from the fireplace and bundle up to collect wood from the veritable wall of it along the garage’s west side while Mom prepared elaborate hot chocolates. Just as the sugar-rimmed whipped-cream-festooned mugs were passed around and we were settling onto the couches, we’d hear Dad stomping snow from his boots and sidling in with an enormous mound of firewood on one arm, his hand reaching with a practiced air for the topmost log and setting it on the grate. “That’ll burn for hours—we’ll be here all night!” someone would observe. But no one ever minded.
There was the earliest-morning fire (or latest night—I can’t now recall, save that it was in the wee hours) I tended with First van Reken friends as the flames licked low and slow in the boxy, sturdy evaporator. Sweet warm steam issued in billowing clouds from the wide pan above it as sap became syrup—the closest I’ve come to alchemy.
At the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic, John-Mark and I caught the soonest plane we could out of Antigua and settled in for a cozy quarantine at my grandparents’ place. It was something of a spontaneous second honeymoon holed up there with stacks and stacks of firewood and hours in which to burn it, studying and reading in its glow.
The specific firepit I gazed into while these memories flickered in my mind has housed a number of blazes in the last couple of years. There was the time we enjoyed an advent evening listening to Handel’s Messiah with a crackling accompaniment. The time an unusually adventurous possum sidled up in the semi-darkness and John-Mark—thinking a feral cat was at last returning his patient affections—reached out and nearly stroked it. There was the time we were dog-sitting, curled up in lawn chairs with a small furry dog warming each of our laps while the fire burned ever lower and The Lord of the Rings played across the laptop we’d propped between us.
And there’s this time, too—my first solo fire. I’m scrawling memories of fires past as the sky darkens and the blaze brightens, and I find myself wishing all of you—my grandparents and parents and sisters and uncles, aunts, cousins and friends and husband—were here too, sharing another fleeting fire and building more indelible memories.
Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth (‘16) is a science communication researcher and practitioner working on her Ph.D. at Texas Tech University. Natasha hails from Calgary, Alberta. Some of her favo(u)rite authors are C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Bill Bryson. Her favourite earthly place is the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and her favourite activities are reading and enjoying the great outdoors—preferably simultaneously.
