The Longest Night

It's dark outside. If I didn't have things to do outdoors and chickens to tend I would ensconce myself in my home without much concern about the lengthening nights, but now I tend the chickens by flashlight morning and evening.  It's cold. It's depressing.  I can't help but notice how short the days have become.

I once heard about a town in Sweden that holds a bonfire every winter to drive away evil spirits. It sounds quaint until one considers that the evil spirits might have names like "Vitamin D Deficiency", "Claustrophobia" and "Cabin Fever." That quaint fire may have a practical purpose of getting us out of our stuffy homes and talking to our neighbors. It makes sense that we need festive holidays at this time of year. Lights and parties and traditional outings entertain us. Cooking and shopping and decorating distract us until finally the days begin getting longer.

Salt and I are certainly shopping and decorating and cooking like everyone else, but we're also becoming experts at building fires in the fireplace.  A brightly crackling fire makes even the mildest nights more cheerful, although we usually need the fire for supplementary heat.


I think more nowadays of the fireplaces in our house as heat sources. In fact, one is a stove insert designed specifically to heat our basement family room. That little wood stove brings to mind the nights my cousins and I would sleep over at my grandparents' farm in the winter. There would be six or ten of us in the room sharing beds, and sometimes singing the song "Ten in the Bed," because that was pretty funny with all of us stacked together. The room would always start out freezing, but Grandma would start the fire in the wood burning stove, and tend it through the night. I would wake occassionally to see her lit by the firelight as she lifted the round lid to stir the embers inside. I didn't think much of it at the time, but realize now there is a real art to keeping a fire lit all night.

I have very little experience with fires, in fact, I spent many frustrated hours trying to start our firepit this past summer. As it has become a necessity for heating rather than aesthetics, I've not only learned how to set up a fire quickly, but I am learning how to read them. One doesn't want to wastefully add logs when all that is needed is to turn the embers over. On the other hand, one doesn't want to wait too long to add another log, lest it not be hot enough to ignite. Reading a fire takes a lot of observation and practice. It also helps to know a little about how different types of wood burn. I've got a lot to learn still, but I can share what I know about the basics of starting a fire.

First, I learned not to skimp on the tinder. Fortunately we have a lot of newspaper for that, but I've found that the slick color ad circulars don't burn well. It helps to also have a slightly more substantial tinder like twigs or pine cones. While I don't always have this type of kindling, Salt has stocked us with pine logs that catch fire and burn quickly. It's a bit of a waste to put too much pine on the fire. Usually a couple of logs will do the trick, because we add at least one log of slower burning mesquite to keep the fire going for a couple of hours. Ta-da! It's the recipe for fire, and it we're putting it to good use this time of year.

Yesterday was the longest night of the year. At bedtime a freezing fog rolled in and left us with several inches of snow. We have made it over the hump, so to speak, but we still have several more dark weeks like the past month before we begin to see the farm by day light during the week again. I think we need more friends to visit, more celebrations and more firewood.  Definitely... more firewood.

#farmdiva