Though the temperature has approached nowhere near cold, we have already lit two fires in the Horton house this fall. There were a couple chilly (below 60!) mornings that the children begged me to light it, so I obliged them.

By light it, I mean I pushed a button on the gas logs. It’s a far cry from the fireplaces so many of us remember as a child. I’m guessing many of you can remember the smell of burning oak on a cold morning. Some of you are probably still lucky enough to heat your home naturally — the way God intended it.

While I didn’t grow up in a house with a real fireplace, my best friend did. His family’s single fireplace warmed the entire two-story house — as long as someone got up early to light the fire. When I spent the night there, that was our job.

There’s nothing quite as jolting to the senses as waking up on a 30-degree morning in a house where the fire has gone out. We put on thick coats just to get out of bed. After a few puffs on the hot coals and a trip to the wood pile, we could usually get the house warmed in an hour or so. But that was a painfully cold hour.

I quickly learned that heat didn’t magically appear on a winter morning. It had to be worked for. It had to be hoped for.

My grandparents used a wood-burning furnace to warm their house, and I can still remember standing in front of it on a cold, winter night. There was nothing I loved more than shoving a log in the furnace and watching it turn red-hot. My grandfather kept a coffee can full of water on top of the furnace as a sort of homemade humidifier. I have no idea if it worked, but I can still hear the water sizzle when it sloshed out of the can and onto the furnace.

Aside from deer camps and cabins, you don’t see a lot of wood-burning furnaces anymore. That’s a shame.

The great conservationist Aldo Leopold once wrote: “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”

Spend a fall chopping wood or a cold night without fire and you’ll fully appreciate Leopold’s quote. Leopold understood something many of us have forgotten. We are intimately connected to the natural world around us, and it’s at our own peril that we forget how much we need it.

Go back three or four generations, and most livelihoods were tied directly to the land. People farmed. People hunted — for sport sure, but also for food. People worked the land in order to survive.

Sure, there were doctors and lawyers back then, too. But there were a lot more people planting gardens so they could put supper on the table. My grandparents surely did. And I picked more peas and beans from that garden than I care to remember. They didn’t work the garden because it was trendy, or because it was “green.” They sowed and reaped in order to survive.

But today, too many of us have lost that connection to nature. In some ways, modern conveniences have made life too easy. Depending on where you live, you can order your groceries online and have them delivered to your front door.  You can push a button on an iPhone, and your HVAC system will warm the house before you get home from work. The thermostat running the system can learn your movements and predict when to turn the heat on and at what temperature. You don’t even have to push a button anymore.

Sadly, my children will grow up in a world where firewood and cold mornings are a thing of the past (I’m fully aware that not all children are as fortunate as mine. Many right here in Lincoln County will know all too well what a cold morning feels like).

My stories of waking up cold and coaxing a fire to life will be foreign to my children, the same way my mother’s stories of rounding up cows on horseback are to me. The way I grew up will be as other-worldly to my great-grandchildren as the stories of my great-grandparents are to me now.

I’m sure it won’t be long before we light the logs again. The children will beg and I will give in, and push the button that sends gas and flames through the fake logs. All they will know is that a warm fire on a cold morning is fun to look at. But I will know different. I will know that it is much more.

 

Luke Horton is publisher of The Daily Leader. Contact him at luke.horton@dailyleader.com