Hope, fire and dirt

Hope is probably a trap. I hope not.

My neighbor’s fire.

My neighbor over the backyard fence builds a fire in his home-made fire pit almost every night. I watch from my deck as he gathers sticks to use as kindling, sometimes from his own back yard, sometimes from the back compost/log/stick pile at the end of my yard within his reach.

I lend him my ladder, he burns my tree trimmings and dead wood. It keeps our world in balance. If I was being entirely honest, though, I’m mostly concerned he’ll fall in because as much as he likes building fires, he also likes beer.**

So far, so good.

He’s an old-school fire guy. He doesn’t believe in using fire starter sticks or fuel accelerants, though he does use his lighter instead of a flint. He is an expert on how each kind of wood burns and how oxygen flows through a fire. He can predict how long a fire will last and how hot or brightly it will burn just by the type and age of wood he uses.

Building a roaring campfire from scratch is a painful lesson in patience. The right kindling, exact placement of the wood to invite oxygen, the careful nursing of a single spark ... all these little things that must go right for the flame to catch and the logs to burn. And then there is the maintenance and vigilance so the fire doesn’t go out.

But extinguishing this roaring fire is easy; just drop a clump of dirt on the flames. Done. Out. No patience needed, no planning, no concern about how to find more wood, no empathy for others who need the fire for food and warmth. Just, destruction.

Hope is the former. Hope is also what it looks like to start rebuilding a fire when someone comes along and just dumps their load of dirt on your hard work.

I’m not sure how many fires in a life each of us has within us, but as I get older and stare into the tunnel of old age in this country, I’m increasingly convinced it is one less than we each need. I want to scream at the young that hope is a trap, that there is nothing for people who hope except a Sisyphusian existence of building fires.

Yet, I resist the urge to tell them to buy a shovel and a sturdy bucket. I’m beginning to feel that might be a character flaw.

*This newsletter started out as a comment about hope on

Katie Hawkins-Gaar

Substack,

My Sweet Dumb Brain

You should subscribe; kindling and all that… you get the metaphor, right? Also because this is my space and I can shamelessly plug anyone I want,

Liz Plank

writes

Airplane Mode with Liz Plank

and she asks her interview guests, “What’s the last thing that gave you hope?” I dunno about you, but Liz is a fire that refuses to be extinguished.

**You might be thinking ‘fire and beer’ are a bad combination, but when I moved to Ohio 31 years ago, I was introduced to ‘beer and drive-thru.’ These folks here make it work!