Housatonic — For many years it’s been my custom to choose a bright day in January to burn my brush pile. I’ve regarded these forty years of fires to be markers for change, a symbol of renewal, perhaps, even a stack of lessons learned. At the least, they’ve been a cleansing of unwanted memories.
Maybe a pyre would be a better word for my annual pile gladly given over to the flames. The fires have had to perform a whole lot more cleansing and purifying. Much of what was burned were mistakes. Not mistakes I’d made by tossing the stuff on the fire but mistakes in judgment, the detritus of dreams I chased too far for too long.
One year, a raft of partially rotted six by sixes compacted the pile. Bearing their weight made the fire especially efficient that day. I’d thumped into them while digging around a garden patch I thought needed some wild flowers. A few inches under leaves, I dug up the first beam I’d struck and another behind it as well as couple more down the line. They been so long forgotten they’d accumulated an inch-deep layer of leaf molder.
They obviously had been meant to be something once, but they simply had evolved into a rotting reminder of a lost, faded, or deferred dream. It’s best, I think, that such reminders be stacked onto a burning pile since they were a reminder from a time in my life needing to be seared from soul and memory.
This year’s fire was legal, at least according to regulations. I had nothing to burn but brush (OK. I had used an old drawer to get the thing started.) and the remains of a “decorative” shrub I’d ignored too long. When given the opportunity, it had morphed into a really raggedy-looking tree. I tried to trim it, shape it up some with a chainsaw, but it turned out looking like a ghastly, blasted, tree from no-man’s land.
The pieces of its trunk, though I cut them short, weighed a whole lot more than a two-foot chunk of wood is supposed to weigh, indeed so much more I had to wheel the pieces one-by-one to the pile with the two-wheeled dolly.
I tended the fire using my ancient, two-tined, hay fork, pushing unburned stubs and chunks of branches into the coals so this year’s burning would be complete. As I worked, I considered: this January, I hadn’t had to burn away any regrets or missteps or reminders of my tumultuous past.
I breathed easy, relaxed for once, and without dread. For the first time in my forty-fire memory there was nothing to burn but an old tree, some prunings, and, I confess, a splintery, old drawer.
