“Ice is the silent language of the peak / And fire the silent language of the star.” An excerpt from Sonnet 10 of And In The Human Heart by Conrad Aiken.
I don’t have a large fireplace at home but it serves our purposes. It is situated in our family room and it provides a glow to warm body and soul on nights like these. So many new homes today are built with gas fireplaces, but mine in is a wood-burning fireplace. I’ve always liked the idea of real wood burning on the grate. I’m not alone…
“My desire is to sit without emotion, hope or aim in the loved presence of my cottage fire.” A quote from William Wordsworth.
Longfellow wrote: “There is no fireside, howsoe’er defended, / But has one vacant chair.”
“A blazing hearth was the soul of a room; for the average householder, it was the cornerstone of domestic comfort.” Interior designer Robin Guild in The Victorian House Book published by Rizzoli.
Peter Steinhart writing in the January 1985 issue of Audubon quoted religious scholar David M. Knipe, author of the book In The Image Of Fire as saying: “Hearthless homes have no ‘centre,’ no focus, and they provide nothing to gaze into for that reverie which is essential to every human.” But not all homes have fireplaces. If you live in an apartment or condo, you may not be able to have a fireplace.
When I first moved to Montreal in the late 1970s, the first condo I lived in had a fireplace. I was in a ground floor corner unit right over the garage door. That first winter I realized why these units had the luxury of a fireplace; the heating in the building was not sufficient to keep the units warm. One very cold winter’s night, a night very much like tonight, the door jammed open below me. It felt like someone had left the freezer door open onto my unit. I huddled in front of a roaring fire and kept warm throughout that long night. From that point on, I wanted to make sure there was a wood-burning fireplace in whatever place I called home.
In years past, I have shared a cord of wood with a neighbor on our street. We had just enough wood left over from last winter to get us to this point in February. As it said in the 1979 edition of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, you should have half of your wood and half of your hay left by February, in order to make it safely through the rest of the winter. I must be in trouble this year–I forgot the hay…
If you don’t have a fireplace, I thought I might share the light from mine with you on this cold winter’s night… Enjoy!
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Don Jackson
