There's a fire burning in our fireplace. I haven't lived in a house with a fireplace since 1987; I'd forgotten how it transforms a room. Fires give off a different sort of heat from a heat register - it's alive, pulsating, and it comes with neat crackly noises and a distinctive smell. Most of us, I think, have some sort of positive memory connected to firelight - candlelit dinners, campfires in the Strawberry Point area woods, Christmas singalongs around a fireplace much like ours. And maybe there's something else, too - something deeper than memory, some part of us that remembers when a fire was all that stood between us and the scary unknown. Whatever the reason, I'm certainly not fighting the appeal. It's inefficient compared to a gas furnace, I'm sure, but who expects magic to come cheap?

And on top of that, there's snow falling outside for the first time this fall - golly, but I do love this time of year.