Slow Burn

The evening sky is streaked with high pink slashes. The backyard is littered with the first fallen leaves, palm-shaped platters skittering in the breeze.  Under the canopy of the sawtooth oaks, acorns the size of plums litter the ground awaiting the hungry deer who leave footprints that look like hearts in the aftermath of their banqueting.  The stillness and the quietness is mesmerizing and I could sit here in the waning light for hours if I did not have a job to do.

In a metal bucket set safely on concrete, I make a fire.  The fuel for the fire and the object of the fire are the same.  I am disposing of some documents, documents from another time, another life, and, while shredding such things is the currently preferable way of disposal, I do not have a shredder and, now that I have gotten up the nerve, I do not want to wait.  

The click-click-click of the grill lighter echoes a little as I thrust it into the bucket.  The paper, thick sheets of lawyer stock, is resistant to my destructive efforts, as words often are, and it takes a few seconds for the flame to catch.  When it does, there is no leap of light and heat, only a low and slow tremor of combustion.

I could (Maybe I should.) go inside – start a load of laundry, unload the dishwasher – while the incineration continues.  I could leave the fingertip-sized flames unattended.  The likelihood of the fire escaping the bucket is, as my brother’s friend used to say, less than none.  I do not, though, leave my posta, mesmerized as I am by the orange curls that lick at words written long ago.  

It is almost autumn, the season I most associate with fire, more even than Christmas with its candles flickering from tabletops and fireplaces making shadows on nearby faces.  Autumn is bonfires and oyster roasts and marshmallows metamorphosed into charcoal briquets, but mostly autumn is the burning off of fields.

You cannot live most of your life as a farmer’s daughter and not understand in a visceral way the powerful magic of fire rushing across acres of land.  You cannot breathe in the acrid smell of dead corn stalks or peanut vines and not feel a rush of adrenaline, along with the slightest bit of fear that the firebreaks may not hold, that the dwarf-sized flames could conceivably overtake the boundaries made by hapless humans.  And you cannot ignore the truth that destruction is often the only way to start over, to begin again, to let go of one thing so that you can grasp another.

I have learned many things from being a daily witness to planting and plowing and harvesting for over 50 years, but that lesson may be the most important.

Smoke rises from the bucket and moves in an invisible current toward the horizon where the day’s remaining light hovers.  The sheets of paper that once were startlingly white and crisply flat are now black and, if I dared to touch them, they would leave my fingers stained with smut. What the words said, represented, promised or denied is now gone.

The fire eventually consumes its fuel, leaving thin black wisps of ash in the bottom of the bucket and the faint scent of backyard barbecue in the air. 

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