Friends have gone to gas. Friends who I never thought would go to gas have gone to gas. Gas, for friends, to whom wood was like a religion.
I’m talking about a gas fireplace. Gas logs made of cement. Whatever they’re made of, they’re not made of wood.
I understand. There are a million reasons to choose gas over wood and many start with the environment.
Gas is easy on the environment. Gas doesn’t launch anything in the air. Gas is cheaper, more energy-efficient and a good gas fireplace can probably heat an entire house rather than a six-foot circumference around the fireplace like ours does.
I’m all about the environment. I love the environment. The deer, the bunnies, field mushrooms in the winter and dew on the morning roses.
I love being in the environment, thinking about the environment and carrying on about the environment like I’m doing now.
However, I don’t want to give up on wood. Not yet. Maybe not until I go to the place where I’ll never be cold again and when I do, you can use the last of the wood in the wood pile to send me packing because olive burns sure and hot.
My own wife has turned on me. Hard to believe. She had my back like heat from a good fire but now her ardor has cooled like the morning ashes.
“You know it would be nice if I could just come into the living room on these cold mornings and turn on the gas,” she said. “I’d probably use the room more.”
You want me to give up wood? What would I do with my friend, Bart? Our one-day-a-year trip to Lindsay and the olive orchards where we saw, drag and haul the heavier-than-you think olive branches in the old truck?
Shall I sell the truck too? Throw away my leather gloves that protect my city-soft hands? Should we abandon the stories we tell each other on the way there and back? Stories that aren’t true, but could be.
If there is no wood, there are no conversations about wood:
“Why doesn’t this wood burn? Why did they sell me green wood? When did wood get so expensive?”
Conversations about the good old days. You can’t have that kind of conversation around hot cement. Then, you’re talking about changing with the times and why would I want to do that?
How do you replace the sound? The crackling, the popping, the sighing sound of a fire after cocktails, dinner and sitting by the fire? The sound of a log falling off the stack after you’ve gone to bed, a log that may or may not have rolled on the oak floor and burned a hole in it?
I love the smell. I especially love the smell of our fireplace that evidently has a hole somewhere in the chimney, a chink in the brick wall, and after the fire burns for five or six hours, there is wood smoke in every room upstairs and down. I’m surprised we haven’t been asphyxiated while sleeping, me dreaming of wood and Sue of a new gas fireplace.
I’m sure there are rebates galore on the new gas inserts and when you do the math, it pays for itself before the pomegranates ripen and the leaves turn brown but right now I like knowing there is wood stacked geometrically in the woodpile, a place where brown recluse spiders and black spiders can nest and termites can propagate and eviscerate the north side of the house until the only wall left is the woodpile wall.
These are the good old days. I’m too young to give them up and this childhood seems to be lasting a long time.
February 01, 2021 at 09:00PM
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HERB BENHAM: You want me to burn cement? - The Bakersfield Californian
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Herb
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