I make a pile of the junk found in the basement today as I cleaned: broken hoe handles, bird feeders that had seen their last winter so long ago that I can’t even remember using them, spare wood that I’ve been saving — triangles, short pieces, long half broken pieces, even two broken pool cues well over a year after we gave away our pool table on Craigslist, a pizza box a little over a week old that had been sitting in a refrigerator that entire time holding bits of Howie’s bread that I’ve been nibbling on here and there. A pile of trash collected through the day will soon be nothing bad nothing but ash.
Ordinarily I would be a bit worried about starting a fire this late in a South Carolina June. Usually the grass is brutally brittle by now and brown, but back to back monsoons have thoroughly soaked the ground so that the grass looks like it’s early May, and there should be no danger. Still I keep the hose pipe next to me just in case a stray ember ignites a small patch of grass light or, perhaps worse, a concerned neighbor (read: worried; read: nosey?) calls the authorities. “Yes officer, I have a means to extinguish the fire immediately right beside me. No, officer I do not have a permit.”
It’s probably appropriate that today of all days I have set a fire a bonfire in our backyard, for today Kinga and the kids went for a walk down to the small river that runs through Jablonka, near which teens for decades burned bonfires legally (possibly) and down vodka illegally. When we still lived in Poland, K and I took numerous walks to that same spot. I took my parents to that spot when they came in 2004 for our wedding. I took L to that spot several times when we spent the summer there together in 2013. It’s about a mile from her house, maybe more, but it always seems both shorter order and longer, a path through fields of potatoes, beets, cabbage, grass for livestock. It’s comfortably known, that walk, and it’s always one of the very first things we do when we go back
Bonfire always makes you think all is well with the world. They’re so calming, so simple, so primitive, so hypnotic. Just sitting looking at the fire (and if you’re lucky enough to hear the crickets around you) seems to square everything in the world. Even if you’re an adult who never really experienced bonfires as a child, it still seems to bring about a rebirth of youth, If you’re with friends, conversation always leave early always meaningful and always nostalgic; if you’re alone, you feel as if you’re the only person on Earth. You can hear cars passing in the distance, your neighbors chatting on their back porch, but you’re still alone in the world.
I sit in the backyard at our fire thinking of my family in Poland as I hear a jet fly overhead, approaching the regional airport some 15 miles away. I miss them terribly, and our daily Skype chat is a small little blessing. Yet I’m strangely content because because I know that, like the bonfire, the separation is only temporary. And that’s really the trick to getting on in the world contentedly: understanding that so much of it is temporary and making your peace with that simple fact.