Reflections: Home Fires Burning

*Caution: this article contains instances of navel-gazing and maudlin self-reflection. Sentimental readers should exercise caution.

Autumn afternoon. Cornflower-blue sky. Falling leaves and dust motes drift through luminous shafts of light falling between trees. By mid-afternoon the shadows are lengthening and the air’s so still that the sound of a twig cracked back in the woods carries a hundred yards or more. By 5 pm night’s descending curtain is turning down the lights—from gold through purple to blue velvet—and the air cracks with the promise, finally, of a cold night to come. At last it’s time for a fire.

When you live in a hot climate there’s something tremendously satisfying about the arrival of cool weather. Out in the country where we live, you can almost hear the woods breathe a sigh of relief when summer finally relaxes its grip. As nighttime temperatures dip into the fifties, the trees seem to stand a little straighter, shaking off their summer burden to let the leaves come tumbling down. The first bonfire of the fall is always huge. Our year-round efforts to beat back the ever-advancing forest that threatens to swallow our house result in the construction of an enormous burn pile, shortly followed by a bonfire visible from space. This year, with us home far more and with the fall-out from various hurricanes having added considerably to its size, by early October our burn pile was giving the Great Pyramid of Cheops a run for its money. So on a still Saturday night we invited some friends around, dragged lawn chairs and a bottle of whiskey down to the clearing where it stood and, with the help of some judiciously applied diesel, set the thing ablaze. It didn’t take much. Within moments the whole pile was transformed to a white-hot pillar of flame that pushed us to the very edge of the clearing and sent a river of sparks up to join the stars. By morning all that remained of our burn pile was a gray, smoking pile of ash surrounded by a blackened ring of scorched earth. And an empty whiskey bottle. In the pantheon of property maintenance tasks there aren’t many more satisfying chores than that. 

If fire was Netflix for cavemen then I come by my affinity honestly. My dad, who once did one of those genetic ancestry tests and found out that his DNA is eight percent Neanderthal, always adored a fire. When our family moved from suburban England to small-town Australia in the 1970s, the combination of wide-open spaces littered with highly combustible fuel constituted a kind of personal nirvana for him. When I was a kid hardly a Saturday night seemed to go by without Dad assembling a teetering pile of tinder-dry eucalyptus to burn. Nowadays, in the aftermath of the massively destructive bushfires that periodically blacken great swathes of southeastern Australia’s bushland, the authorities tend to take a dim view of pyromaniac Englishmen clutching boxes of matches and heading for the treeline. For good reason the laws governing outdoor fires have gotten very strict, and Dad hasn’t had a chance to indulge his enthusiasm for a good, big bonfire for decades. I wish he could join us for one of ours but he’s an old man now, and with COVID, that’s not happening anytime soon.

The exchange of one season for another is always welcome but in this strange year, with so much upheaval and the country experiencing critical shortages of the word “unprecedented,” there’s something about the observance of simple rituals, like lighting the first bonfire of fall, that feel more comforting than ever. Or maybe I’m just getting sentimental: when the kids were small we’d make a big event of the first bonfire, bundling them up and bringing out the marshmallows and hot dogs, which they’d perch on the end of long, bamboo poles and try to roast, but mostly incinerate, before falling asleep in our laps. Mathilde is a senior so this is presumably the last fall she’ll spend living at home. She’s loved a fire ever since she was a little girl. I like to think she’ll miss bonfire night once she’s gone. 

According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, which has been releasing annual winter weather predictions since George Washington was president, this will be a warm winter. Then again, given the way we’re changing the climate perhaps they’ll all be warmer now. Perhaps that calls for adjusting our fall tradition: instead of lighting fall’s first bonfire in October we’ll end up saving it until closer to Thanksgiving, and light it when Mathilde comes home.