first frost

max woke up early. always always always he's up early but today was different. sure, it was still dark and sure he was whining, but today it was cold. not just chilly, but frost cold. the outside was hovering at thirty and the inside of the house, at least upstairs in the bedroom, was just about sixty. sixty is perfect for sleeping. it's a good snuggling temperature, especially if you have a down blanket or a wool blanket or a few dogs to scatter across the bed. perfect. so i put the covers over max's head and convinced him that snuggling down into the warmth was better than putting feet on what would likely be a pretty cold wood floor. especially since he is so low to the ground and his belly is pretty close to his feet. cold belly is awful. snuggle down, dog, snuggle down. and he did for a while. but by eight when the sun was fully up and crashing through the windows i had to admit that getting up was probably a good idea. the wood stove would be mostly ash and coals and the coals wouldn't keep things warm much longer.

we got up, me and the two small dogs, and walking down the stairs i recalled that during one of max's earlier whining sessions the sweetie miraculously awoke and went down to add logs to the fire. this would mean less work for me and that's always fine. so we went outside. the whole world was crisp, frosted, leafless. the small dogs were quick in their bathrooming and we hurried back inside to what appeared to be an almost empty stove, a stove with a thermometer that read just under 350 degrees. what had the sweetie done, i wondered. i worried there might be logs somewhere else, somewhere he, in his nearly asleep state, confused with the stove. no logs on the couch. no logs on the dog bed. no logs under the library table. but still, not much beyond a coal or two in the stove. i loaded the stove with new logs and went to feed the leaping hounds and open the downstairs shades, let in a little light. ten minutes later i was pretty proud of myself. there was a roaring fire and the thermometer read 450. not bad for just tossing in a few logs. not bad at all. i peeked into the iron kettle on top of the stove. bone dry. i filled it with water and a little eucalyptus and put it back on a stove that by now had hit 500 degrees. perfect, and in no time at all. i was starting to feel like some sort of fire queen. fierce. i sat in the rocker, reading, watching the flames get wilder and wilder, reflected in the glass of a bookcase.

that's about when i heard something that sounded like bacon sizzling and popcorn popping out of control right behind my left ear, right on the stove. i looked up to see a column of steam shooting out from the kettle spout and a bubbling fountain of boiling water spewing out at the same time. it was pretty in the way lots of scary things are pretty- fire, avalanches, tornadoes. i got up and saw tiny beads of water like clear ball bearings bouncing and rolling all across the top of the stove, a stove that was now reading just over 600 degrees. there are two hundred more degrees on the thermometer, so i wasn't worried, but the flames were different, a yellow that was almost white. very close to the color i'd like to paint the kitchen or the color the bible says jesus will be on his return, but not a color i'd seen inside the stove before. i managed to pour out some of the water in the kettle and settle that whole thing down and then i attempted to put another log on. i was on a roll. i opened the door and used the poker to wedge a log in. the blast of heat that hit me was much more physical than i'd expected. evidently it scared the log as well because the log leapt out of my hand and away from the poker and rolled its slightly singed self back out onto the hearth pad. this, i finally realize, is why we have a hearth pad. stupid log. whatever. my fire was still roaring. then i called the sweetie down from upstairs. i wanted him to see my magnificent fire skills.

the sweetie did not react quite the way i thought he should. he is not a worrier. he is not a panicker. he stood in front of the stove and watched the golden white flames very suddenly turn the glass window black. in a matter of real live seconds. and the flames kept getting wilder. and the sweetie was worried. he was not yet worried to the point of panic, but he was more worried than i recall him being when a plane we were in lost an engine and had to shift everything to manual power and make only left turns until we landed. he kept talking. that's how you know the sweetie is worried. he attempts to work out a situation entirely out loud, checking and rechecking everything over and over.

it wasn't the logs. every log we put on burned like the fires of hell. it wasn't the damper. we could turn it completely closed and the flames licked the glass and snarled out like monster claws if we opened the door. wait a minute. how would the stove have so much draw with the damper closed? how how how? recall a few entries back when the sweetie determined that he was powerful enough to open the stove's ashpan to help create draft? well, if you don't, he did. he did this against the advice of the nice men who installed the stove. against my advice. with the imagined blessing of my own father, the sweetie decided that this would be his signature fire starting move. even in his sleep, even at six in the morning, the sweetie was his james dean self, restarting a cold fire with the help of the open ashpan. however, when attempting this sort of thing, most folks keep the pan open a second or two. most people are awake when they attempt something like this. the sweetie, in his near-sleep state, wasn't able to get the latch completely fastened. the ashpan reopened.

so between six am and about eight thirty, we burned the equivalent of a day's worth of wood. we learned a little bit. the sweetie will never again get up at six am and be expected to do things. i will be in charge of all morning fire duties. the real truth, though, the clean, honest thing we now know for sure although i guess we always sort of knew it somewhere really, is that max sets the agenda. we do what we're told. we will never again upset max because evidently upsetting max upsets the natural balance of the world and draws us nearer armageddon. max is definitely opposed to this.