The Certainty of Fire

This much I know…fire keeps nothing it holds.  In the hands of fire, a sturdy length of oak is no greater than the thinnest ply of tissue paper.

I sat alone near the lake yesterday, feeding rakings of leaves and branches shed from the golden willows into a fire.

The fire grasped everything I offered without hesitation.  Orange and yellow flames first entwined, and then danced all around each stick I poked into the red jaws of the fire.  Eventually, the flames reduced the thickest branches and thinnest leaves to the same small mound of fragile white ashes.

Strangely satisfying, all of it.

There is no set requirement to think of anything other than the fire when you are tending one.  For this reason, I remember nothing else.

—Mitchell Hegman