When autumn rolls around, my life resembles a nursery rhyme.
Five, six, pick up sticks.
That’s the result of choosing a house with a handful of 50-foot trees in the yard.
The shade will keep the house cool, I thought when I relocated from Arizona, still focused on the heat. I didn’t think about the effects of fall.
At least once a week I walk the yard gathering in a five-gallon bucket whatever is too big for the lawnmower to mulch. Sometimes, Cora, my three-year-old daughter, will join me. She’s a good little helper when she wants to be, but mostly she’s a fantastic supervisor and observer, dispensing thoughts like…
“Daddy, you missed one over there.”
“Didn’t you do this yesterday?”
“It’s more fun for me to walk in my bare feet after you pick up the walnuts.”
After we get a full bucket we head over to the most useful yard-care tool I own. It’s a piece of clay pottery my wife and I had thrown on the truck when we moved: a chimenea. So treasured that when I unpacked it, I discovered that the movers boxed it complete with the ashes and twigs that resided in the belly when we left.
Originating in Mexico in the 17th century, the original chimeneas were used to bake bread. Cora likes to help me break up the sticks and fill ours. Of course, she’s the perfect height to look in and make certain that it’s properly loaded.
A good chimenea is a wonderfully engineered device. When a fire gets going you can see the rush of air swirling inside; that vortex sounds different, more intense. A hotter and cleaner burn. Especially when you overload the thing and the flames shoot two or three feet above the flue.
Cora once asked me while looking at a particularly hot fire, “Fires are usually orange and yellow, Daddy. Why is this one so blue?”
Over the summer, my wife and I used the chimenea to introduce Cora to the joys of making s’mores. It didn’t take her long to make an essential connection.
So one recent evening, she surprised me at the door as I arrived home from Wabash.
“Hi, Daddy. I want to help you pick up sticks in the yard.”
“Really,” I answered, with no such plans for yard work. “You want to help?”
“Yep.”
As I helped her put on her shoes, she leaned over and eagerly whispered in my ear, “Can we have s’mores for dessert tonight?”
— Richard Paige is associate director of communications and marketing at Wabash.