Time for Change
Hayden, Kit, Heidi and Cathy during their October 2020 visit to Boomerang Creek.
Early in the morning, I open the iron door of the Buck Stove that breathes heat into the living room most days and evenings. Set into an existing limestone fireplace, the stove warms the living room where Kit and I gather each evening and talk about a world of things that affect our lives. I’ve come to appreciate this stove that keeps us warm when cold winds blow and gives us a sense that somehow everything will be alright.
Building a fire is a ritual that never feels to me like a chore. It begins with scooping ash from prior fires into an old green bucket. The next step is to tear strips of newspaper lengthwise and wad them up and stuffing the paper under the iron grate inside the stove. Dried twigs and small branches broken into short lengths are then stacked over a few pieces of Georgia fat wood lined up atop the grate as a base for pieces of seasoned split firewood--the final layer set in place.
Recently, our son Hayden flew to Columbia from Spain and our daughter Heidi from the Bay Area of San Francisco. Given the geography and distance of their journeys, their body clocks were all over the map after they arrived. Early mornings, we gathered in the predawn hour on our covered porch—masks on and wool plaid blankets piled across our laps. With our hands warmed by cups of coffee or chai latte, we took in the beauty of the woods and glade now awash in autumn colors. When Hayden headed to the kitchen to scramble eggs and juice fresh oranges, I headed to the Buck Stove. As I opened the glass door of the stove, I felt it was a perfect occasion to keep a fire softly burning throughout the day.
That was when memory kicked in and I thought about something I learned from my father years ago when my parents were visiting Breakfast Creek—our first home in Missouri. I remembered watching as he laid in a fire one morning but didn’t reach for a match. He knew what was needed and began to blow. Dad had grown up in a Pennsylvania farmhouse warmed by a wood-burning kitchen stove. “Bank the coals,” Dad had told me. “Cover them with ash and they’ll start a fire up again the next morning.”
Kit feeding logs into the Buck stove at Boomerang Creek
As I laid in a fire that first chilly morning of Hayden and Heidi’s visit, my thoughts were captured by warm memories of family over the decades. We’d had a fire the prior evening that burned down to a bed of embers. Before closing the door of the stove, I’d banked ash over the remaining embers as if tucking them into bed for the night.
Conjuring memories of my father, I placed 4-5 pieces of crumpled newspaper on top of the coals the next morning and pumped the bellows until the embers burst into flames. It felt important for me to bring the fire gradually back to life, to work at the task, unconcerned with time. It is the same with writing I thought to myself. Writing is a way of keeping the embers of memory alive.
Our children, now in their early fifties, stayed a week. We celebrated our mutual birthdays and the fact that we were all together for the first time in much too long. One morning, we teamed up and took turns operating a log splitter and then restacking the split logs on two racks for the upcoming winter season. And each evening, we put together meals enjoyed with wine and slow conversations at our long harvest table.
Sitting in front of our fireplace that week, memories were rekindled from our ten years living together in a tiny 1920s cottage up an urban canyon in west Los Angeles. Decades fell away and we found ourselves gathered around the stone fireplace at the Cottage again. Each of us mentally reconstructed that shared setting where we convened before dinner and talked about the day—for the kids at their West L.A public schools, Kit at UCLA, and me across town at a large inner city junior high school.
We also relived two six-week cross-country trips the four of us made in a VW Westphalia pop-top camper van while visiting Salter kin in Wisconsin and on the East Coast. Those adventures shaped us as a family. And as we shared our collective memories of that early chapter in our lives in L.A., we realized how much we truly miss being close together geographically. Missouri has been Kit’s home and mine for the past 32 years, but at this point in our lives, it feels worlds away from our adult children and grandchildren—both geographically and politically.
As Heidi prepared to leave for home, we all grew very emotional. It was then that a conversation began in earnest about leaving Missouri to start a new chapter of life somewhere in northern California closer to family. As Heidi drove away in the rain to return her rental car and catch her plane, Kit and I knew that it was time for a life change of real moment. Now as the 2020 election plays out, the idea of a move west feels surprisingly urgent and hopeful.