`A Face in the Fire'

Even in our domesticated oblivion, the seasonal cycle moves us. I was home five days with my younger sons while my wife worked six days straight. The weather, by Houston standards, turned damp and cold. The heat came on for the first time. I responded by moving indoors and “nesting,” like any good mammal. I made the Thanksgiving turkey and trimmings and, the next day, two turkey-and-vegetable pies with the leftovers. I baked bread, scrubbed toilets, washed floors, unstuck drains. I vacuumed and dusted, for only a fool fouls his nest. I reread the “House-Warming” chapter in Walden, which begins like this: “In October I went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than for food.” I went a-graping to Costco, where the bunches are as beautiful as Thoreau’s but without much fragrance or flavor.

In the same chapter, Thoreau notes that during his first winter in the cabin he cooked on the fireplace, with wood he had gathered and chopped himself. In the second winter he used “a small cooking-stove for economy, since I did not own the forest.” Of course, for the author of Walden, the switch signals a fall into technological perdition:

“Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, but merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the Indian fashion. The stove not only took up room and scented the house, but it concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a companion. You can always see a face in the fire.”

Spoken like a true childless bachelor. I have a family, if I want to see a face, and if I’m roasting turkey and baking bread, I’ll use a stove, thank you. We attended a Thanksgiving dinner three year ago at which the host (also childless) prepared one of his turkeys in a propane-fired deep fryer in the backyard. I felt ridiculous standing around the damned thing, listening to it gurgle and hiss, and waiting for one of the kids to tip it over. Fortunately, my middle son threw up on the back steps, so we went home early, without turkey.

It’s important to know the rhythms of the world. Biology is humbling. Even at this latitude, where the seasons are flattened and blurred, there’s comfort in knowing our small place in the big cycles. Tom Disch put it like this in “October,” a poem from About the Size of It:

“Without the fable of these falling leaves
How would we know how to die?”