My brother, M, built a beautiful fire pit in his back yard. If you do not live in the desert you may not understand an arid climate dweller’s fascination with the fire pit. How to explain?
You see, in the summer, when it seems that the temperatures will never again fall into the double digits, and that I will never again be able to touch the car steering wheel without oven mitts, my heart longs for cold – anything cold. Ice, lemonade, freezer burn – it doesn’t matter. Then comes the third week of October, (Yes, feel free to be appropriately horrified. Summer extends May through October in Arizona.) and you hear a collective sigh of relief from Bisbee clear up to Camp Verde. The daytime temperatures become livable, and the night stars emerge gorgeous. I believe we enter into an agreed upon collective amnesia about those triple digits we suffered May through, oh, Halloween, and delight in the beautiful weather we are now experiencing. Now for the fire pit stuff.
Arizonans spend 6 months in their homes trying to out wait the heat. So, the rest of the year, we are tenacious about being outside. If you go to a restaurant on a damp, chilly January evening the patio will be still be open, and we will still be gathered on it. Heaters may be scattered around in a feeble attempt to bring the air temp up a bit, and people may be huddled in their coats, teeth chattering between bites, but darn it, we’ll be outside. To be fair, you often find “snowbirds” out on the patios, as well, and they don’t notice our “cold” at all because they’re from places like Saskatoon or Yellow Knife. They laugh at us, see our piddly little 50° and offer to raise us a -30°. No thank you; I’ll huddle in my coat beside the heater and stop complaining – maybe even remember to wear gloves next time.
I think the love of fire pits stems from the fact that those masonry rings allow us to be outside in our own little stake of Earth, warm and cozy when it’s a “cold” night in the desert. From our own yard we can stare up at the stars and contemplate differences between Sunni and Shiite, whether Hitler really died in that bunker, or why are there so many kids of paprika (Seriously, anyone know why? Do they all taste the same?), or we can just listen to our neighbors’ incredibly loud televisions playing Honey Boo Boo and ponder that child’s future therapy bill . Doesn’t matter because it’s our own space; we can do what we want. Also, there is the added benefit of the delicious wood smoke scent (I think that should be a cologne.).
M used brick pavers to build his awesome pit. It’s perfectly round and just the right size to fit six adults around it comfortably. He dug into the hardened desert floor to allow him to set pavers onto the bottom of the pit so that when the fire gets going nice and hot, the bricks themselves get warm and toasty, radiating heat to the cold bodies settled beside them. Yep, my brother is a smart, smart man. Most of the time. . .but someone forget to buy a fire poker.
So, we’re sitting around this amazing fire pit, and the wood is burning hot. Embers are popping off the top log onto the rocks around the pit, and that top log has the lizard-like crackled skin of wood that needs to be moved to make way for a new piece. My brother very calmly leans forward and picks something up from below his seat. In the darkness, I can’t quite make out what he’s doing. I squint, and I’m not sure, but it looks like he’s donning a glove. Nope, not a glove.
“Are you wearing an oven mitt?” I ask in disbelief.
Nonplussed M responds, “Yep.” My brother is a man of few words.
Then I watch as he does something that defies words. (Well, apparently not because I’m going to write about it. You know what I mean.) He reaches into the shadows and retrieves a pair of grill tongs – GRILL TONGS!!!!. With these tongs clasped in his mitted hand, M reaches into the fire and picks up the top log, moving it aside. As he’s doing this, embers are popping onto his wife’s oven mitt, sparks are flying up at his face while M is cursing. And I am silent.
Should I comment on the fact that he needs a fire poker? Nope. Should I state the obvious – that this was a poorly thought out plan? Negative. Should I mention that reaching into the fire with grill tongs was dangerous and maybe just a tad, uhm, stupid? Naaaah. Why? Because he would appreciate none of these comments, and he already knows.
Instead, I sit there watching my brother move the logs around with his grill tongs gripped in his oven mitted hands, his arm hairs being singed off. Embers pop out of the enclosure and land around him, and I think how different this experience would have been even a year ago. I don’t know that I would have been able to not say all those things to him, to keep my mouth closed, to keep my own counsel. What’s the difference? Well, I could say that I am minus a 200 lb man, but really, that’s just incidental. It’s more how that divorce, how that experience, has changed my heart, my mind, my soul, or to be more accurate, it’s how God has used that awful, eviscerating experience to change me. Nope, I am certainly not the woman I was a year ago. (Please understand that I am not intending to be flippant about divorce.)
As the fire is reflected in the eyes of the people sitting around us, even as I am roasting a marshmallow for my nephew, I feel God tapping at my heart, “Pay attention. There’s something to this fire pit thing.”
Here’s the deal: the process of building and maintaining a fire is not unlike that of changing the human heart. My brother laid the logs and set them to light. As the flames grew and the wood burned, he added new logs – bigger, stronger logs – to strengthen the fire. Occasionally the older wood didn’t quite burn through enough to allow for the newer wood to be set in place. So, M would reach in with those tongs and move the old, brightly glowing wood aside, and in the process the old logs, already alight, already weakened, sometimes split, sometimes dissolved, but always, always somehow transformed. Bottom line, the fire that was, never remained the same once the new logs became part of the conflagration. The fire might grow bigger, might remain the same size, but the new log, once aflame, always consumed the old. At times, the fire required more care, more active intervention than others, but it always needed an attendant.
God lays out our lives like an Eagle Scout setting up a campfire. Then He allows situations, people, events to enter every day much like the new logs on M’s fire. Sometimes we are ready for these things and sometimes we need a bit of extra care; if He needs to, He reaches in with the tongs and shifts things around a bit. Our old “wood” – our old situations, experiences, pains, accomplishments – are consumed by the whole of the new. We are ultimately an amalgamation of our experiences, our interactions, our hurts, our healings – our fires. And we are never, ever alone.
Not bad for an evening by M’s fire pit, eh? Oh, and guess what M’s getting for Christmas?
The Unexpected Life 