Burn Day

Smoke and Ashes

When the air is fresh and cold; when the snow is gone; when the first snowdrops appear in the sunny corner by my elderly neighbor’s shed; when the brighter light is falling longer on the days, then Burn Day is here. It’s usually in late March or early April that this momentous event takes place; an event that is thrilling, gratifying, sustaining, and harrowing.

It all starts with daily treks around the yard and the Way-Back (an area I’ve been trying to clean up and civilize for years), picking up the tree limbs that have blown to the ground in the winter wind or collapsed under the weight of snow and ice. This year, there was also a dead pine that toppled over and a very long-gone maple that had been taken down in September. There is raking involved too and a few choice words while tearing up a nasty underground vine that will be back again with a vengeance by May.

When I’m in pioneer mode, I always think of my father, who would admire the grit and gumption necessary to get this property cleaned up. Granted, there is no sartorial favor in baggy jeans and wellies and an old brown fleece coat, but I doubt if the women crossing the Rockies in covered wagons gave much thought to the cut of their skirts.

Every year, there is enough wood and brush and vines to make a fire lick its chops for hours. And when we lit the newspaper at the base of the burn pile, my brother-in-law and I (I never burn alone…feel pale and shaky even at the thought of it) brace ourselves with steel rakes and a silent prayer that the wind won’t pick up. And I say a prayer to my Dad, to keep us safe from soaring embers, to keep the woodshed safe, and all the trees in the neighborhood too.

In those few moments before the fire coils into a furious blaze, I have all I can do not to turn the hose on it, because once it takes hold, it is all primal, whooshing like a black cyclone and swirling thick acrid smoke and specks of fire into the air like a million hell-bent fireflies. I stand back, hose in hand, humble and awed, wondering what in the world I’ve done.

And when it is over, hours later, the ash is two feet thick, and we are spun round and round with wood smoke, bone weary with the hurling and sawing, bending and attending. There is lunch, to be sure, outside on a big round tray, and that is spirit lifting, but by early evening, there is only smoldering ash and exhaustion. I look around the land, ready now for daffodils and flowering quince and forsythia, and feel my father’s smile. “It’s good work,” I hear him say, as he pops open an ice-cold beer and looks at the gray pile and the sky and the cleared ground.

Burn Day. Good work. Spring begins.