The Second Fire · Gerald McClaw

The frost was lighter this morning.

I noticed immediately — the way you notice when a familiar discomfort eases slightly, not enough to be absent but enough to be gentler. Four point nine overnight instead of yesterday’s three point eight, and while I understand that one degree is not much in any meaningful scientific sense, my feet on the stone floor of the smial understood it perfectly. Yesterday the floor said get your slippers on now. Today the floor said you have a moment, but don’t push it. I pushed it. I regretted it. But for one and a half seconds I stood there barefoot and felt like someone who makes bold choices, and that is worth something.

The tea was ready before the sun was, which is how I like it. Sunrise at six forty-five — a minute earlier than yesterday, the mornings reaching backward, pulling the light toward them like a child tugging at a sleeve. I stood at the round door with the mug in both hands and watched the dark become less dark, and then grey, and then that particular early-morning blue that is not quite a colour but a mood. The frost was there on the grass, thinner than yesterday, barely a suggestion, as though the cold had made its point already and saw no need to repeat itself at full volume.

The sky was clear again. Third day running. I am beginning to feel that October is showing off.

There is something about a clear sky in the Shire in early October that feels like it cannot possibly last. Spring is changeable here — everyone knows this, every farmer, every gardener, every Hobbit who has ever hung washing on the line and then stood at the window watching the clouds stack up like plates. The weather turns. That is what it does. It gives you a beautiful morning and then takes it back by lunch, like a gift that was only a loan. So three consecutive days of blue, unbroken, not a cloud, not a wisp — it feels extravagant. It feels like someone left the good weather running and forgot to turn it off.

I keep waiting for the change. Looking at the horizon for the first smear of grey. Checking the wind direction — still from the south-southeast, still gentle, six or seven kilometres per hour, the same polite murmur as yesterday. The same humidity, eighty-eight percent, which I have decided is the Shire’s resting state. The air damp but the sky dry. The ground soft but the light sharp. Everything simultaneously wet and clear, which should be a contradiction but is simply what this place is.

The UV index is nearly seven, which for the sixth of October is frankly absurd. The sun is not supposed to have this kind of authority at this time of year. I wore the hat again — the straw one, the mushroom hat, the one I said yesterday I would name. I have not named it yet. Naming a hat feels like a commitment I should approach with care. You cannot un-name a hat. Once it has a name it has a personality, and after that you have to consider its feelings when you leave it on the hook, and I do not need that kind of emotional complexity in my relationship with headwear.

I lit the fire again tonight. The second fire.

This is different from the first. The first fire of the season — yesterday — was an event. A milestone. The acknowledgement that the year has turned, that warmth is no longer optional, that the hearth has purpose again beyond holding a decorative arrangement of pinecones and one slightly embarrassing candle I bought at a market in Bywater because the Hobbit selling them was so earnest about the lavender scent that I couldn’t say no. The first fire means something. You remember it. You write about it.

The second fire is different. The second fire is a decision. It is the moment where you confirm that yesterday was not a whim. You are really doing this now. The fires are back. The season has shifted and you have shifted with it, and from now until — what, April? May? — you will do this every evening: the kindling, the arrangement, the match, the crackle, the slow build from flame to glow to that deep orange settling that means the wood has caught properly and you can stop watching and start trusting.

I find I am better at building fires than I was at the beginning of last winter. Not dramatically better. I have not achieved mastery. But I remember now which wood catches fast and which wants patience, and I remember that the airflow matters more than the spark, and I remember to leave spaces in the stack — not too tight, not too loose — because fire needs room the way conversations need pauses. It breathes. You let it.

The smial warmed quickly. Sixteen point one was the high today — warmer than yesterday by nearly two degrees, and I could feel it. The evening air held more warmth in it, the kind that lingers after the sun drops rather than vanishing the instant the light changes. The fire did not have to work as hard. It settled into a comfortable burn, steady and unhurried, and the combination of fire-warmth and residual-day-warmth made the smial feel, for the first time this season, genuinely cozy rather than just adequately heated.

I sat in the hearth chair again. The one that faces the fire and does not face anything else. It is becoming my evening chair now, the way the window chair is my morning chair, and I like the symmetry of it. Morning: window, sky, tea, the garden coming into focus. Evening: fire, warmth, tea again, the garden disappearing. Bookends.

I checked the beans this morning. Again. The same anxious inspection, the same relief. They are fine. They were fine yesterday and they are fine today and they will almost certainly be fine tomorrow, and yet I will check them again because that is apparently who I am now. A Hobbit who monitors legumes.

But I noticed something new. The flowers — those black-and-white blooms I described yesterday, the ones that look designed to make both insects and Hobbits feel feelings — are opening further. Not all of them. The ones lower on the stems, where the plant is most established and the frost reaches least, are spreading wider than they were even two days ago. The clear skies are doing their work. The sun, at nearly seven on the UV index, is pouring energy into them with the kind of enthusiasm that I associate with someone who has just discovered they enjoy their job.

I stood there longer than I needed to. I know this. I stood in the garden in my slippers and my dressing gown with the tea going lukewarm — this is becoming a pattern, me standing outside while perfectly good tea cools in my hand, the tea paying the price for my botanical sentimentality — and I watched the light move across the broad bean flowers, and I thought: this is what October gives you, when it is being kind. Frost at night to keep the slugs honest. Clear skies by day to keep the flowers opening. Cold mornings to remind you that you are alive, warm afternoons to make you glad of it.

I walked today. Not far. Up the lane to the top of the hill where the path turns toward Overhill, and back. Perhaps forty minutes. The wind was behind me going up and in my face coming down, which is the wrong way around if you ask me — I would prefer to be pushed uphill and left alone on the descent — but the wind does not consult Hobbits on these matters.

The hedgerows are doing something interesting. The hawthorn is still green, mostly, but there are berries now — red, dense clusters of them, bright against the leaves like someone has gone along with a paintbrush and added details. And the blackberries are nearly finished but not quite, the last stragglers hanging on the brambles, smaller and darker than the ones from a month ago, intensely sweet in the way that fruit gets when it knows its time is running out. I ate three. They stained my fingers and I did not care.

The view from the top of the hill was — well. On a clear day, from that particular spot, you can see the whole of the Water and the fields beyond it, the patchwork of greens and browns and the thin silver thread of the stream, and the roofs of Hobbiton below, and the smoke from chimneys — more chimneys smoking now than last week, I noticed, which means other people have also reached the conclusion that fires are necessary again — and beyond all of it the sky, that same absurd unbroken blue, going on and on as though someone had decided there would be no horizon today.

I stood there and breathed. In and out. The air cold in my nose, warm in my lungs. The wind gentle at my back. The sun on my face, warm enough to feel, sharp enough to notice. Six or seven kilometres per hour from the south-southeast, and at the top of the hill you could feel every one of them, individually, as though the wind were introducing itself one gust at a time.

Sunset at nineteen twenty-five. One minute later than yesterday. The days are not getting longer — not really, not yet, not in the astronomical sense — but they are hovering. Holding their length. Refusing to contract the way I expected them to. October is being generous.

Tuesday. The day after the day after the weekend. The day that has no particular reputation, no mythology, no character. Monday is a fresh start or a burden, depending on your relationship with beginnings. Wednesday is the middle, the hump, the pivot point. Thursday is Friday’s younger sibling, living on borrowed anticipation. Friday is Friday. But Tuesday is just Tuesday. It arrives without fanfare and leaves without ceremony and in between it asks only to be got through.

And yet.

I built a fire tonight that was better than last night’s. I ate blackberries from the hedgerow. I watched the broad bean flowers open a little further. I stood on a hill and looked at the Shire under a sky so clear it felt personal, as though the weather were doing it specifically for me, which it was not, but which I chose to believe anyway because choosing to believe nice things about the weather is a victimless act of self-deception.

The frost will come again tonight. Lower than last night, probably — four degrees, maybe three. The smial is warm. The fire is settling into its long orange phase, the phase where you stop adding wood and start letting it do what it knows how to do. The tea is finished but the mug is still warm in my hands, and I am holding it because the warmth is comforting even though there is nothing left to drink, which I think is a metaphor for something but I am too tired and too content to work out what.

Tuesday. The second fire. The same sky, the same wind, the same beans, the same walk, the same Hobbit in the same slippers writing the same kind of words.

And none of it was the same at all.