We had a bonfire last night. The night was cold and clear, and we burned a season’s worth of blackberry vines, windfall trees, and ancient fence-posts studded with rusted staples and short lengths of barbed wire that some now-forgotten rancher sweated over, pulling the wire so taut it sang, though it was loose and buried under forest duff when I tripped over it last winter: a danger to my cattle….
I wrote this almost ten years ago, two years into the Great Recession. I brought it out today at the request of a neighbor, and I thought I might share it here. Full essay below the fold.
Second-Hand Sunshine (early May 2010, overlooking Cow Creek)
We had a bonfire last night. The night was cold and clear, and we burned a season’s worth of blackberry vines, windfall trees, and ancient fence-posts studded with rusted staples and short lengths of barbed wire that some now-forgotten rancher sweated over, pulling the wire so taut it sang, though it was loose and buried under forest duff when I tripped over it last winter: a danger to my cattle. The rancher probably nicked his thumbs a time or two, stringing fence on this place that we now presume to call our own. He called it his, then, and —sweating in the sun—he felled the trees, and he split the posts, and he fenced what he thought was his with shining strands of steel, and he spilt his own sweat and blood upon this clay.
Last night’s fire blazed hot for an hour: too hot to get near enough to enjoy, hot enough to consume any poison oak in the pile. When the fire had settled down, and we had rearranged some of the logs for a smooth burn, we settled down, too, with some screw-cap wine and marshmallows, for a bit of serious ember-gazing. The frogs sang to us, celebrating the exquisite joys of their short lives: ponds, and bugs, and sex.
The old fence-posts were tough. They burned slowly, grudgingly. I don’t know what kind of wood they were. Black locust, maybe, and still so hard when I cut them from the clay that I hadn’t been able to pull the staples the rancher had pounded in—sweating in the sun, his hammer-blows echoing off the hills like rifleshots—before I was even born, so I just cut the barbed wire short. I figured the posts had been put in the ground maybe eighty years ago, and that the trees were eighty or a hundred years old when they were felled and split. If so, the heat and light they gave off—last night, against the cold and the dark—were the stored energy that fell to Earth when Lincoln was alive.
Sunlight falling on a leaf. Silent, complex chemistry, joining water and carbon dioxide; sugars to cellulose and lignin, building the sturdy bones of a tree. They say that trees are a conversation that the sun has with the clay and the rain and the wind. That conversation has been going on a long time here on the little place we briefly presume to call our own. In the blink of an eye, there is a spark, and sunlight that fell when Lincoln stood at Gettysburg is released from dark bondage, leaps to my eye, and is gone. The frogs continue to sing.
We are brief. Not as brief as the spark, nor the hammer-echoes in the hills, nor as brief as the frogs and their joys. More brief than the trees, though, and briefer still than the long conversation between the sun, and the clay, and the rain, and the wind. The sun and clay and rain and wind are our elders; sometimes—like last night, warmed by second-hand sunshine—we children creep, all sleepy-eyed, halfway down the staircase, and eavesdrop in wonder at the echoes of that ancient, whispered conversation.
We had a bonfire last night, the last of the season. This morning I stir the ashes and pull out a few strands of barbed wire. The pond is full of tadpoles.