Continuing from Monday and Tuesday: As November grew colder, and since our main source of warmth was fire, we began to forage in the wild yard behind the condemned house for firewood, of which there seemed to be plenty at first, with so many fallen branches lying about.
There was a wonderful fireplace in the living room of this old condemned house that we were living in, with two built-in benches on either side. These benches had seats that lifted for the storage of firewood, and they had wooden backs, too, so tall and straight against the wall they seemed like pews in a church.
I loved going out to the backyard to gather firewood. There was great peace to be found beneath that roof of treetops, wading through those piles of leaves, and standing in the silence that such a place seems to find a way to sustain, no matter how loud the rush of traffic passing by.
There was a garage that stood at the far edge of the
backyard along the alley which was to be torn down at some future date. It listed to one side, and had that plaited-look of old houses that you see in the countryside whose roofs are so porous they look like loosely-woven basketry.
Here is a Carl Larsson painting, "The Last Sun Rays," of an old country place that does not quite yet match the ruins of our old garage. I love the old woman here, sitting in the last of the sun, peeling potatoes, perhaps. It reminds me of all the times when I went out the back door at sundown to gather branches to make a fire inside our very cold old house.
The alley side of the garage had a host of fallen and loose boards and a broken door that had long ago fallen off its hinges, and so we began to burn these, too.
We started our fires with wads of wallpaper. The walls of the old house had all been wallpapered with an old-fashioned brown-rose flowered and striped paper. It was so old now that it shattered at the touch and drifted everywhere on the floor like windfall leaves. We tore it off the walls, and first we dragged it all out to the garage, and then we brought it all back in again, to burn as a kind of kindling.
The paper above is a piece of gift-wrapping paper that I salvaged from twenty years ago. It is a little similar to the wallpaper, but way too bright.
Here is another piece of gift-wrapping paper, without the stripes but a little closer to the faded look of the wallpaper whose pattern I remember and yet don't quite remember. Still, it stays so much on my mind, I think, because of my memory of burning it in the fireplace.
I tried to recreate the way it must have looked back then.
But I found I could not put the shreds of paper in the hot coals with one hand and snap the photo with the other hand quickly enough ~ the flames rose up and consumed the paper in a flash.
If you look very closely, though, you will see two tiny little fragments of the gift-wrapping paper here, at the forefront, just a split second before the flames devoured them.
Here is "Dame Wiggins of Lee," a poem by Mary E. Sharpe and John Ruskin, from My Book House, with all her cats before her cheerful fire. Show me a fire in a fireplace, and I will start remembering a multitude of fireplaces in my life, but none is more special to me than the fireplace in the condemned house.
Just before winter set in, we managed to procure the last of the documents needed to have this house released from its condemned status and restored to city code again. And, yes, it was wonderful to have gas heaters in every room, a gas stove and refrigerator fully functioning in the kitchen, running water from every tap, electric lights everywhere.
But my memory of all of us gathered around our fireplace in the dark, burning wallpaper and branches, looms much larger in my mind. We were all in our twenties back then, but not everyone who lived in that old house with us lived to be thirty-years-old, and so the future casts a shadow back over those light-hearted times.
The house is no longer there, but it was not torn down. Not too long after we lived there, it was carted away in the middle of the night to start a new life in a little town not far from Austin. All of the little houses on its block are gone, and towering condos stand where all those trees once towered.
Oh, I would love to find that old house again some day and put my hand upon its heart, in remembrance.
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