What I Miss in my Life is Fire

Note: I am in a writing class that is focusing on goddess archetypes. This piece was inspired by St. Bridget, the Irish Hearth Goddess.

What I miss in my life is fire.

I used to have a fireplace. The house I lived in in Ohio when I was a kid had a fireplace. Our house before that in Chicago did not. When we lived in Chicago, we would go camping almost every weekend from late spring through early fall and my mom would satisfy her need to build fires. When we moved to Ohio, one of my mom’s many requirements was that her new house had a fireplace.

My mom knew how to start a fire and how to keep them going with minimal effort. I admired her skill and knowledge. It was like magic how she knew about fires. In Ohio, the fires were decorative and relaxing, not to keep the house warm. The fireplace in Ohio had glass doors, so you could shut them at night before the fire died out, and we could go to sleep.

In college, when Jack and I started dating, I got the flu. He brought me a gift bag filled with trinkets he bought at Walgreen's. In it was a votive and a candle holder. I watch the flame dance and I smelled the vanilla wax. I began to understand my mother's curiosity and interest in fire.

My first apartment in Chicago had a fireplace. I lived there for eight years. We would order a cord of wood from a guy in a truck who would pull up on the corner of Clark and Belden. We kept the wood in the apartment until one year when we found little bugs that bore holes in the wood. I became terrified that I had brought some version of a termite into the apartment, so we moved all of the wood to the wrought iron fire escape in the back of the building.

Our sterile, low ceiling apartment in St. Louis did not have a fireplace. The small, square apartment had no privacy, no beauty. It was in a “nice” neighborhood. While other buildings had character, our apartment was inoffensive, without charm, not of an era.

Our first house on Westminster Place in St. Louis was a manse. It had three floors, and on the first floor were three inert fireplaces, too small to be up to code, the chimney’s closed off like an infertile beast. In the empty fireboxes, I placed large candleholders. One held a dozen votives. Another held three pillar candles. The fireplaces in the upstairs rooms were closed off by drywall, hiding the inner usefulness, hiding beauty and warmth. Even though I haven’t lived in that house for twelve years. I dream of taking a sledgehammer to the drywall and finding the hidden hearths.

Our cozy home in Seattle does not have a fireplace to fight off the damp chill. Instead, our house is a nest tucked in the trees. We have a view of the volcano from my daughter’s room. That is a different fire, boiling deep, deep, deep beneath the mountain and snow, magnificent and terrifying at the same time. But we don’t have a fireplace.

What I miss in my life is fire.