Thunder

It is thundering here. Loud booms of thunder that roll from one side of the sky to the other, trailing the atmosphere behind like an echo. It hasn't started to rain.

I think I've finally managed to coax a fire in my cute brick fireplace. It's built in the shape of half of an upside-down ice cream cone, with u-shaped openings into the bedroom on one side and the living room on the other side. It's big and oval inside, maybe four or five feet from one opening to the other, and about two feet wide, and tall, about three feet from the bottom to the top. The openings don't face each other, they each point into the room they occupy, so at first you can't tell that there is only one fireplace. It might be two separate fireplaces, back to back.

I grew up in Montana, and I have probably started fires a thousand times or more. Not just campfires for s'mores, but real fires in a black cast iron stove just like Laura Ingalls Wilder, who every good pioneer girl wanted to be like. The fires I started heated the house, kept us warm in the bitter Montana winters. I have carried armloads upon armloads of wood, from where they fell from my dad's ax on the chopping block to the woodpile outside, then from the woodpile to the bins near the stove. I have laid fires in the stove, ready to light with a single match when we come home. Though I hated all chores, I didn't mind carrying wood, except when it was freezing outside, and dark.

You'd think with all this experience I would have no trouble starting a fire with heartwood kindling and small, almost identically cut eight inch by two inch by three inch heartwood "logs." By all reasoning, I should be able to light a fire like that with a single match, after it has been perfectly stacked in my fireplace every day by the staff at Rio Caliente. I should be able to light a fire like that with a look and a snap of my fingers.

But I think something about the oval shape and the way the two openings are not directly across from each other has done something to the oxygen in the fireplace. There isn't any, or at least not very much. The fire has to be set in the dead center, right under the chimney, because even though the ceiling of the fireplace is domed to point to the chimney, smoke can't find its way out and air can't seem to find its way in. And they've built up the floor of the fireplace with spare bricks, so that it's eight inches shallower than it was built to be, and four inches narrower.

I've been feeding heartwood kindling into the center of the stack of logs, lighting each piece of kindling from a candle on the mantle. It has taken me almost an hour to get the fire going, but I finally did it. At first I didn't think it would catch, but maybe the chimney got warmed up, or the barometric pressure changed, or maybe the wood just decided to spontaneously combust. I can't see the flames from here in the living room, but I can see that they are there, flickering just beyond the opening, bright and cheery. And I can see the reflection in the window because I haven't closed the curtains yet.

The thunder has stopped. It's still not raining.