On the Labor of Heat

The drift of perfect snowflakes outside the window distracts me. Falling thick and languid by the thousands, they look soft enough to fill a pillow, but I'm too old and know better.

The house is still except for the intermittent rush of heat from our furnace, a loud and constant sound when it roars after giving preliminary creaks and clicks. It's strange to feel warmth pour through metal slats and have no idea how a fire was kindled to produce it, if in fact it was produced by a flame and not some baffling miasma of gas and magic.

Growing up, I rode the wood wagon with my family into the Big Woods to load it full of what would warm our limbs in the night. Sometimes in the dead of winter, oftentimes cheerful, sometimes surly, we would snack on saltine crackers and apples and take swigs from a milk jug filled with well-water, chilled so by the temperature outdoors that it seared our throats as it swooshed down. In autumn, the smell of leaves and diesel fuel and the growl and whine of the chainsaw were symbols of heat. In spring, we'd shed the wool hats and, with equal amounts of excitement and dread, face the prospect of getting stuck in the mud as the wagon slid and lurched behind the John Deere.

On school days, after we stepped off the bus and into the house, Mom would often greet us with cookies and the charge to bring in three loads of wood before supper. What constitutes a load? This question occupied wasteful amounts of energy and arguments as we trudged a path from wood stack to basement door with a wheelbarrow or sled or armful of wood, depending on the depth of snow. We'd fight to defend our honor or to assault another's-- Yes, it was a full armload!-- before piling back into the house to shake off the snow and make peace.

Even though Dad tended the chainsaw, older brothers split the majority of wood, and Mom fed the fire all the night long, I knew where that heat came from. And just now, sitting down to write a blog post, the sound of the mysterious gas furnace turned me entirely from the post I wanted to write into this soliloquy on heat. To end all things, I just heard a thump and Susannah's steps above my head, so this is what you get.

Thank you, Lord, for warm bones and snow falling and, most of all, for the footfalls of children to keep me new.