Those home fires

It’s cold. Really cold. Ice-blue skies and hazy peach clouds cold. Frozen fog cold. Thank goodness for wood stoves cold.

This morning the thermometer on the porch hovered near zero. My New Jersey family, Canadian and Chicagoan friends can scoff, but single-digit temps = Arkansas frozen over. (Though it could be worse.)

I drove home at half-speed yesterday, happy that Don and Jack, who’d had a snow day, were there building a fire – the first one our fireplace had seen since early 2009, when we started taking our house apart.

Then, the fireplace was the center of the house, in the biggest of its four rooms. We used the living room as a living room at first, then a bedroom, before it became part of the construction, too. We hung heavy wool blankets over the doorways and camped out in it for two days during an ice storm that left us with only the fireplace for heat.

Well, it isn’t that cold – at least not inside, thanks in part to the same fireplace. It kept our central heat off last night, and made my husband more happy and proud than I’ve seen him in a long time. Or at least since he opened his happy birthday miter saw.

It feels good to keep the home fires burning.

Because even if we still have sawdust in the corners, tubs and boxes piled high, plastic-covered windows and doors and not one complete bathroom,

and even if my husband spends most of his time at home wearing a head lamp,

things are coming along.

Outside it’s beyond freezing, but inside we’re getting warmer.

What’s saving you from hibernation this winter?

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