I light the fire in the morning, first thing (especially important today - snow to low levels is forecast and I'm at home all day, bar a little relief-teaching at the high school). I've everything I need at hand: newspaper (yesterday's edition of the Southland Times, with anything interesting cut out and pasted into my scrap book), kindling (beech twigs, snapped to size and crispy dry), 'claves' (not sure what you call the next-size-up from kindling, but they're the dimension of the wooden claves I used to bang together as a primary school kid, to beat time to the peeping coming from the recorders and the breathy moan of melodicas - my fire-claves are kohuhu and koromiko), and the logs that will burn throughout the day; alder, beech, oleria and makomako.
The trick of course, is to have the fire look beautiful at every stage. Fires try to do that anyway, but it is possible to detract from their natural form through carelessness and I do what I can to keep it natural.
Beyond the beauty of the fire, of course, is the bonus of the heat. It's so nice to bathe in the warmth of a fire when it's chilly outside. My ears benefit too, from the warmth but also the sounds that fire makes: crackles and pops, not so much as I'd really like - the glass door muffles most of them, but I can open the door and listen in. And I do. Sit with the door open, enjoying the experience of a fire in the hearth. The fire doesn't seem to spark like those I remember from my childhood, when as a boy I'd leap up from my chair, licking my fingers as I did so, to pick up the ember from the pock-marked mat in front of our open fire and get it back in before it burned me, which it usually did, a little.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
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9 comments:
The lack of sparks will be because of the type of wood you are burning. We use Macrocarpa for our main wood and it is a mighty thrower of sparks. No sitting with the fireplace door open in our living area.
Macrocarpa's a great wood to build with Thrash. I'm hammering together a partition upstairs to close in the flue where it passes through our bedroom, using macrocarpa. We originally wanted the flue exposed, for the heat it would radiate into our room, but it's so noisy! The sound of the wind whislting cross the top, the rain and hail hitting the flue where it emerges into the world, even the contracting and expanding of the metal as it heats and cools is too much for us - so used are we to the country-quiet!
I'm half-way through the construction and enjoying the challenge (no handyman me!)
Terry and I were recently saying how hypnotic and meditative watching an ever-changing fire can be..we concluded there must be something very primitive being rekindled somewhere in us..although the GST etc is often neglected, as a result :)
Fire watching beats TV watching anyday. The ultimate experience is to sit around a camp fire, staring in the flames and listening to a long tale or softly spoken poetry.
Suz, Terry, Jonesy - I'm with you.
Loved your use of 'rekindled' Suz!
How many people nowadays, sit around a fire listening to poetry?
I know the Irish fiddler gets to stand closest to the fire. Celtic music and open fires go beautifully together.
Should you ever need any advice/guidance re: your building, feel free to give Terry a shout...he spends most of his days telling extremely highly paid engineers and architects where they've screwed up!
And it's frightningly more common than you might think!)
Jonesy..what a lovely comment..or though being a bit of an adrenalin junkie, I lean toward the horror stories.
Suz - I need Terry now, but there's probably nothing he can do. I've just discovered that when you saw a stick of timber lengthwise (3.5 m) the angle produced isn't 45 degrees, if the stick is oblong-section, rather than square. This makes for a problem when trying to cover a corner with gib board and you needed those two lengths to screw-to.
:-)
No worries Rob...to me it sounds like you're speaking in tongues (disturbingly more KS than RG), but I'm sure it will make sense to Terry when he arrives home!
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