Ten Fires and a Monday · Gerald McClaw

Monday arrived with frost on the latch and a thermometer that read four degrees, and I thought: yes, that seems about right.

There is a particular Monday feeling that the Shire does very well. The world has had its Sunday — its day of nothing, its day of stillness, its day of not needing to justify itself — and now the gears have turned and there is a new week spread out ahead like a fresh tablecloth, slightly creased, waiting for someone to set the plates. Monday does not ask if you are ready. Monday simply begins.

It was cold this morning. Not the vicious, sub-zero cold of yesterday — one point six at the lowest, which is warmer than yesterday’s minus zero point six by the full width of a degree and a half, and I should not pretend that a degree and a half does not matter, because it does. It is the difference between frost that crackles underfoot and frost that merely glistens. This morning’s frost glistened. It lay across the flagstones in a thin, bright film, pretty rather than perilous, and the gate latch yielded to the thumb on the first attempt instead of requiring the usual winter negotiation. Small victories, these, but a Hobbit catalogues them faithfully.

It felt like two point one. The humidity was ninety-five percent, which is down a fraction from the week’s excesses but still the sort of number that makes the air feel heavier than it is, as though every breath carries a little more of the world in it than strictly necessary. The sky was mainly clear — a high, pale, washed-out blue with the occasional wisp of cloud drifting across like an afterthought the weather had and then abandoned. The kind of sky that offers no drama and no threat and no narrative, only light. I was grateful for it. After a certain number of clear winter mornings in a row, the sky begins to feel like a reliable neighbour. You stop watching it for trouble and start simply enjoying the view.

The wind was barely there. Two kilometres per hour from the west, which is not a wind so much as a memory of one. I stood in the garden for a few minutes after checking the thermometer and I could not feel it at all. The smoke from the chimney went straight up, thin and blue-white against the blue-white sky, rising without deviation until it was too faint to follow. No rustle in the hedge. No creak from the garden gate. The world was so still that I could hear the frost melting — a faint, continuous ticking, like a clock made of ice, counting down the seconds until the sun reached the right angle and the flagstones warmed and the whole delicate architecture dissolved into damp.

The sun rose at quarter past seven and set at half past five. Ten hours and sixteen minutes of daylight. Two minutes more than yesterday, and I am not going to apologise for tracking these increments, because they are real. Two minutes is nothing in isolation. Two minutes is the time it takes to butter a scone. But two minutes per day, accumulated over the weeks since the solstice, becomes something substantial — becomes the slow, grinding, beautiful machinery of the planet remembering that it tilts, that the light comes back, that winter is a season and not a sentence. The afternoons are noticeably longer than they were a month ago. Not yet long enough to feel generous, but long enough to feel honest. The sun no longer slinks away as though embarrassed to have shown up at all.

I did not do anything remarkable today. I should say that plainly rather than hunting for a way to make unremarkable things sound remarkable, which is a temptation these dispatches sometimes present and which I try to resist, because honesty is worth more than cleverness, even when cleverness would make for better reading.

What I did was: I tended the hearth. I walked to the end of the lane and back. I made soup — parsnip and thyme, from parsnips pulled last week that had been sitting in the cold cupboard growing increasingly insistent about being used. I sat in the chair by the round window and watched the light change through the afternoon, which is a thing that sounds idle and perhaps is idle but which I do not intend to stop doing, because watching the light change is one of the few activities that asks nothing of you and gives you everything it has.

The high reached fourteen point two, which is the warmest it has been in days. Warm enough, by early afternoon, to sit on the bench by the south wall without a coat. Not for long — the warmth was the focused, temporary sort that winter sun delivers, a narrow beam rather than a broad gift — but long enough to close my eyes and feel the heat on my face and think about nothing at all for a few minutes. That kind of warmth is a loan, not a gift, and the interest rate is the speed at which your shadow lengthens once the sun passes its peak. By three o’clock the bench was in shade and the temperature was already sliding back toward single digits, and I went inside without complaint, because I had already received more than I expected from a Monday in early August.

The fire. Ten.

Ten. A round number. A number with a sense of occasion about it, a number that stands upright and solid and looks well in a sentence. Ten consecutive evenings of fire in the hearth, which is — I have been thinking about this all day — probably long enough for the habit to have properly taken hold. If the Kyoto researchers are correct, and the anterior cingulate cortex releases its grip somewhere in the first week or so, then by day ten the thing is no longer a decision. It is a behaviour. It is part of the evening the way tea is part of the afternoon: not required, exactly, but missed if absent.

I used oak tonight. Not because oak is special but because oak is reliable, and reliability felt like the right note for a tenth fire. Apple wood is for celebrations. Pine is for moods. Birch is for when you want the fire to be quick and bright and then over. But oak is for the long evening, for the slow burn, for the steady orange glow that fills the room with warmth that does not flicker or fade or demand attention. Oak is the fire equivalent of a Monday: unglamorous, dependable, and better than it gets credit for.

Through the round window: stars again, emerging as the last light fades. The mainly clear sky has held all day and into the evening, and the stars are sharp in the cold air — not as sharp as yesterday, perhaps, when the humidity was a touch lower, but sharp enough to pick out the constellations I have been learning to recognise over these winter months. Orion is low on the horizon, half-hidden by the hills. The Southern Cross is up and bright and positioned, as it always is, with a kind of confidence that I find reassuring, as though at least one thing in the sky knows exactly where it belongs.

Ten fires. A Monday. Parsnip soup. Frost that glistened instead of crackled. A wind so light it might as well have been a rumour.

I think there is something to be said for weeks that begin gently. Not every Monday needs to arrive with ambition and intent and a list of things that must be accomplished before Friday. Some Mondays are simply the door you walk through between the rest you had and the work that is coming, and the door itself does not need to be remarkable. It just needs to open.

This one opened, and what was on the other side was quiet and cold and clear, and I walked through it without hurrying, and now it is evening and the fire is burning and the frost is returning to the flagstones and I am here, writing this, which is what I do.

Ten for ten. The tablecloth is laid. The week can begin.

— Gerald McClaw, ten for ten, Monday, oak fire, mainly clear, fourteen point two at the peak and dropping fast, parsnip soup with thyme, and the frost — patient as always — waiting to reclaim the flagstones by morning