The Firepit - written November 26th, 2010.

There was a storm three days ago that I think most people thought would end the world.  I think at this point, I don’t think that the world will ever end.  Things just change, things that we work on for so long fall apart and slide away into the background, and we continue on and on, only stopping every once in a while to remark about what we can survive.  At the times when we do stop and turn to say this phrase, which is a very true phrase, we may notice for a moment that the person who we are speaking to, whose hand we are holding, might change.  Not to say that they are an entirely new person (although at some truly tragic points in our lives, this may be true) sometimes we just realize that in all of our growing, changing, and surviving, this other person has as well.  Well of course they have.  And maybe what is so surprising isn’t that they have changed, but that in sharing the same space, the same halls, the same rooms, even the same bed, we have somehow failed to notice that they did, or naively thought somehow they wouldn’t.

Mike died in May, and now it is November.  I hated how warm and sunny it was when he died.  It should have been a torrential blizzard.  No one should die when flowers are in bloom.  No one should die the week that summer vacation starts.  All of those children screaming bloody murder as they bust out of school house doors, making pirate ships out of low tree bows and knowing that almost three months is still forever when you’re nine.  Meanwhile, there is a full chapel of confusion listening to a proxy for God try to tell us about some other version of Eternity.  One that seems final.  Not an IS but a WAS.  Remembering to speak in past tense.  And all the saved souls and Christ’s tears and thirty something’s wearing the only suits they own to show up to some silliness that won’t help make sense to any of this.  Then I prayed for the summer to end. 

We have this fire pit.  HAD, actually.  We are leaving this house in two days.  I remember when Mike brought us down to see the house for the first time.  After all the hard work he had put into fixing the place up, he never wanted to live in it.  I think after that first, year, he always referred to it as ‘our’ house. We moved in during a magic spring, with everything green and swaying in the breeze of new beginnings.  And you only get to feel those once, during a time before you can know what’s around the next corner.  With my wife, who was only a girlfriend at the time, and our dog, who was only a pup then, we brought all of the meager belongings we had, bought a hammock and strung lights in the tall trees.  It was nice.  We stayed for years.  Barbecued meat, sang songs, opened presents and drank till the sun came up.  Friends moved into the vacant houses on the other sides of the fence.  We made plans to plant new trees.  We painted rooms and stayed there longer than I have ever lived somewhere since I left my mother’s house.  Now the ground is frozen and we are leaving.  And the lights in the trees have only a bulb or two that aren’t burnt out and the hammock rotted after we forgot to take it down when the seasons changed.  But there is still this fire pit.  The one that Tory and I built from old adobe brick we saved from a gutted house one March weekend.  It is beautiful.  It was our totem.  Like pagans or savages, we sacrificed one heaping pile of wood after another during those long summer nights.  Any photos I have of this place, the parties we had, the friends we saw, they are all illuminated by a firelights orange glow.  I remember when Mike told me that we might as well fill in the fire pit, since everyone was growing up, and he wouldn’t be around that much anymore.  As our resident drunken madman and landlord, Mike felt that it was he who was keeping us up nights howling at the moon and lighting bonfires.  And in a way, I guess he was right.  Every fire that was lit after he died that summer was somehow in memory of Mike.  Every movement that was made was a memorial.  Every party thrown, a wake.  Even months after his funeral, the simple gesture of picking up beer bottles from around the pit or rearranging the lawn chairs seemed like a sacred task with some weight to it.  The houses here are still his, no matter what the bank says.  And the fire pit will stay long after we are gone.  It doesn’t bother me to think that all of this has ended.  I now feel so far from the way it was before that I can’t even feel the shock of change.  And the changing of my life has been like this blizzard, sweeping in so quick that I forgot what it was like to be warm, and only have photos to remind me how we were before.