Don't You Just Love to Play with Fire?
The fireplace, whether it's a chiminea, fire pit or campfire, is a place of imagination. When I was a kid, I liked to imagine that I could manipulate the flames with my mind. I would look for faces and animals in the shapes of the charring logs. I would throw things into the fire to see what would happen when different things burn; peanuts, bread, unpopped popcorn. Okay, actually, I still do all these things as an adult. I just love to play with fire . I love watching the unpredictable meanderings of flames and the smell of smoke in my clothes; it gives me an ancestral sense of connection with what it means to be warm and safe. Fire makes my DNA happy at some deep level. But also, I just like to play with it. I'm not the worst firebug in my family. My wife finds the most exaggerated excuses to toss burnables into our backyard chiminea and fire pit. Technically, we should probably be recycling more paper and burning less, but she thinks of herself as some sort of mountai...