It is a beautiful spring day -- mostly sunny, calm, highs in the fifties.
Ed wonders if maybe we should burn the pile of honeysuckle we chopped down last fall. This is no small pile. As he calls the fire department to get a burn permit and I hear him describe it as a 20 by ten by ten pile, I think -- really? Maybe it's that I'm short, but it seems at least twice that, in all directions.
Neither of us is especially enthusiastic about the job. If the burn goes well, then we should be done in some six or seven hours. But things rarely follow a predicted path. Today, for example, the damn fire will not spread! The honeysuckle hasn't dried out -- it's raw and mostly green and at the bottom of the pile, it's still frozen to the ground.
And so getting the fire to take off is a challenge.
And for the duration, the fire remains very centralized. It refuses to spread. We have to bring limbs to it's epicenter.
At least the containment problem is minimal. We'd raked the dry grass at the edges but this fire couldn't care less about the edges. It wants to be fed and it is not about to go searching for its own grub.
So it is a hefty amount of work and typically that is hugely satisfying for me, except that there is this cold which honestly, does not belong to an April day and especially such a (finally) pretty April day.
My daughter is here for dinner tonight. I haven't seen either girl since coming home from Italy and so it is enormously gratifying to run through all the drama of the last weeks with her tonight. She knows the players. I don't have to explain the context. Both my girls are great listeners.
And now the day is done and my cold is what it is and it's supposed to rain all next week. Well fine. If it's going to be a challenging and sickly week, it may as well rain. Flush out the land, cleanse the spirit.
