I used to love gathering kindling and tying it into handsome bundles. I loved waking in the night during winter and rekindling the flames in the wood-fired oven, the only person awake beneath the silence of the moon.
When the oven is truly hot, the gases from the new logs gather beneath its vault. Suddenly they flood my eyes like the northern lights: a dance, a fury of heat. Kneeling before the spectacle, I could lose myself indefinitely, travel through space and find myself at the centre of the cauldron.
Sometimes it is almost too much. I fear that those flames, no longer containable, might set fire to the small old multipurpose barn.
Emotions, memories.
There is also the rising dough that I must learn to understand, warming beside that dragon’s breath. The fermenting sourdough, smelling so good. The rounds of rye that I smooth, shape and cradle so that they will be well.
This water.
This magic of the elements.
The carefully chosen moment for loading the oven, after cleaning the hearth thoroughly and singeing the hairs on my hand. That immense broom, that mountain of glowing embers.
One day I shall have my own wood-fired oven again. Until then, every opportunity is a small treasure offered to me — whenever I can bake a few loaves in a fire beneath the ground.
– L
