The Hearth
“I have a dream," he said slowly. "I persist in dreaming it, although it has often seemed to me that it could never come true. I dream of a home with a hearth-fire in it, a cat and dog, the footsteps of friends -- and you!”
~ L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island
Just about every place I have lived there has been someplace to have a fire. Just like a bed or a stove, it is a necessity.
One summer I lived in a barn loft and cooked my meals over a fireplace my cousin had used for the same purpose the summer before. The spring the college closed down, I slept for weeks beside a bonfire, a tiny black puppy tucked in my sleeping bag to keep me warm through the frosty nights. When I lived at the farm, the children helped me gather stones from the woods to make a fire pit outside my camper.
Fires are for gathering, for circling up, for cooking food, and for sitting still and listening when you find that you’re all by yourself, with only the stars and your own imagination. Something so wild, contained to something so comforting. The contrast is part of why I love it so much.
We built our hearth in the backyard, a small circle of stones behind the garden. We do not have our own house, yet. But more and more I realize that our home is as complete as I could wish for. Every home needs a hearth, and ours is outside. We’ll plant wildflowers around the spot, and in the fall the goldenrod will surround it in a yellow shroud of privacy.
I have plans for this hearth. On fine spring days when the chill has mostly gone, I’ll rise early and bring the flames down to coals and cook our breakfasts. Cooking over a fire gives me a thrill in the way only something ancient and primal does. It makes me feel viscerally connected to the women who lived a thousand years before me and cooked breakfast for their husbands in this same way, with stark simplicity — heat, patience, salt, and butter.
We’ll ask our friends to bring chairs and we’ll circle around the hearth like people did before they spent so much time indoors. Out there, we’ll look at the stars and smell the honeysuckle and listen to the peepers from the bogs back in the woods. We can laugh and tell stories or play games, but if there’s not much to say, that’s fine too. A fire doesn’t beg for noise, and good friends don’t either, not when there’s a crackling fire to satisfy.
The moon rose Sunday night at dusk, nearly full and so bright. I saw it just as I stepped outside the garage door. The wind had died down some, but I still didn’t light a fire. It was getting late anyway, and the cold would soon drive me inside despite my longing to be that ancient and primal woman.
But just then my mom was on the phone. “I see it, too!” I told her excitedly, speaking of the moon. We both looked at it, the same moon rising from 300 miles apart. We talked about her visiting soon, and my sister’s little boy and his sweet manners. I sat on the edge of our little stone hearth and shivered in the cold while we talked. There was no fire, but she was my first guest.
Thievery
I’m sorry, I can’t tonight. I have plans. The forsythia is in bloom.
It does something to me that I can’t quite explain. Maybe it’s because it’s the first flower to bloom out of the gray yawning puddle that is early March, the first chance at color our hungry eyes have had in months. I have to stop my car — I must have a branch to bring home. The yellow color is intoxicating me.
I remember when I didn’t know what it was called, and my friend and I stopped her car by the roadside and snapped off a few branches from someone’s yard, one of us posted as lookout, before driving on. So you see, I have been taught this vice — stealing flowers, I mean. It has been handed down from own thrifty and scheming housewife to another, each of us in a mad and constant pursuit of beauty.
My friend Anna in college told me a story once about how her brother walked around their neighborhood one night and picked flowers from all the neighbor’s yards to make a bouquet for his girlfriend. That, I thought at the time, was the most romantic things I’d ever heard of. If only a man would steal flowers for me, I sighed. That would be the surest way to my heart.
It all started long ago, with a few innocent daffodils from outside the bank. The climax of my flower-stealing career was the summer we got married, when I convinced Anthony to bike with me to a meadow nearby that I’d seen was full of echinacea, a meadow whose ownership was indeterminate. I was a newcomer. This was the prairie — right? Wildflowers are universal and free.
I was filling my bike basket with the spiky pink flowers when we heard dogs barking, and the woman who lived in the house across the street came out to inform us that not only were we trespassing, but we were also stealing. I had no excuse; I was as guilty as she said.
So you’d think I’d have learned by now.
I can’t explain the thrill. I know it’s wrong; I do. But then I think maybe it’s only as wrong as taking a pen from the doctor’s office or the library. What if it’s just one or two black-eyed Susans from a ditch by the side of the road?
I respect private property; oh, really I do. But there is one thing I cannot resist, and that is a forsythia bush blooming in a wide-open place with no one watching over it. That is a scene in which I’ll admit, I can justify just about anything.
Beside the creek that runs between the soccer field and the antique store, there is such a forsythia bush. The night he asked me to marry him, Anthony and I stopped there on our way home. It was dark, and we were so excited with a brand-new kind of happiness. We cut some branches and took them home, to celebrate our bright future together.
And now another year has gone by, and it’s blooming again, full and bright and wonderful and calling me as strong as ever. So, I’m awfully sorry, but I’m busy tonight. I must go steal some forsythia.
Domestic Experiences
One of the hens has been broody.
I go to gather the eggs in the afternoons when I come home from work, breathing deeply of the sweet air after the slough1 of the city. She stares at me, nestled in her little alcove from which, she tells me in her silent way, she is determined not to budge — not for me, not for anyone. When I poke her feathered breast, she nestles down even more fiercely, contorting her neck downwards to pull the eggs even closer to herself before she reaches out to snap at me again. I retract. I am no match for a broody hen.
“They’re not even yours,” I tell her. And then, in a moment of unfairness, “you don’t even have a husband!”
She looks at me with her wide, crazed eyes, and I know that if she could thumb her nose at me, she would.
Chickens are hilarious creatures, and you know this if you have ever kept them. They have a pecking order reminiscent of feudalism, and once established it cannot be overturned. In our assortment, the broody Rhu2 is quite near the top of this order. She is the elder and senior, but even she can fall into some delusions.
The ladies used to roam the yard while Anthony was away at work, when he was a bachelor with six chickens. But free-range chickens are vulnerable chickens, and in our case, soon dead chickens. Our next batch didn’t last long either, before an owl and a fox conspired separately to pick them off two by two. It seemed that as soon as they were old enough to lay eggs, some harm would befall the poor dears and we’d be left with only one or two, and one or two eggs a day does not meet the needs of two people.
I brought five young hens home from my mother last summer, and Anthony built an iron-clad chicken coop as a fortress for the hens. “If I were a chicken,” I tell him, “I would want to be your chicken.”3 We were starting afresh, determined not to be made fools of by desperate predators, hoping for no more drama. We would give them the best protection we could, and in return, their eggs would be our breakfast.
One afternoon, we both walked in on a hen just as she was about to lay an egg. She squawked, stood up, did a little shimmy, and then it dropped, drying almost instantly once it met the atmosphere. I picked it up, marveling at its warmth. I don’t get over things like these.
Delusional or not, Rhu is my friend. I also don’t wish to be pecked, so I snatch the few eggs I can reach without getting blood drawn and leave her be. She nestles back down into her cozy nesting box, silently cursing me, but I imagine she soon forgets all about the poke and the insult. Besides raising a family of fluffy offspring, she has everything a hen could want. And look at me, generously giving her a few more hours to dream even that might come true.
I thought maybe this was harsh, but upon a google search of the word “slough”, the first image to pop up is a city.
One of a pair named Rhu and Barb. Barb was sadly eaten by a fox, so now Rhu’s name doesn’t make as much sense.
It’s also true that I would want to be Anthony’s wife — obviously.