COMBUSTION CHAMBER

We’re only a few days into this hellhole of a month and we’ve already started lighting things on fire.

The capacity of my children’s minds and bodies— to be still and to refrain from harming each other or issuing extraordinary jungle sound blasts for no reason right in my ear— has run critically low.

One of them glitches out regularly: his body goes into micro-spasms of pent up whatever, and he makes Tasmanian devil noises while flailing like a portable chipper-shredder at anything in his path. The other will be walking as slowly as is humanly possible, as usual, and then look up for no reason and issue a blast of completely unrecognizable noise at the top of her lungs. She sustains it long enough for me to wonder if I’ll just expire right there on the spot from having to endure the purity and decibels of the sound. Asking her to stop is futile because she can’t hear you. She’s become a toucan or something.

“What the—” I manage to mutter, disorientedly, through my stunned and trembling haze.

“Opera,” she says, matter-of-factly, and resumes her sloth-trudge towards more art supplies to scatter to the corners of the earth. (The other day I found her on top of our car with hair-cutting scissors. I really, really just don’t know. She was extremely salty that I took them, though.)

Some kind of deep-brain genetic memory is released into the bloodstreams of people of my husband’s genetic persuasion this time of year. Mud, sleet, confused avian life singing its guts out through the foreboding east wind, and the critical atrophy of hope and sanity all cue them. When they start to throw their bodies against the wall and howl into each other’s faces, when every place we go during the winter to get out of the house has become another grim endurance spectacle, the chemical memory tells them how to keep people of his genetic lineage from chipper-shredding their worlds at the ass-end of winter: light things on fire.

It is my daughter who hears the call of her lineage first. “Can we have a cookout?” she says on a 28-degree, windy, sleeting day.

No one hesitates. The insane toucan opera and the chipper-shredder have been trying to kill each other for forty-five minutes, when they are not complaining bitterly about the really excellent after school snacks I’ve arranged for them on beautiful plates with lots of panache (my own dim genetic memory of how to survive, involving cheese and beauty maybe? Anyway it doesn’t do it for them, not this deep into winter). I pop one of the artisan cheese cubes they have spurned and head for the tinder. Newspaper, egg cartons, kindling that’s had a chance to dry by our woodstove.

I SAW A WAY TO MAKE A GREAT FIRE YOU JUST STACK THINGS LIKE THIS CH CH CH CH CH the other one says, taking his parallel karate-chop hands and “laying” them at right angles to each other all the way up an imaginary stack. He likes to watch survival skills videos on YouTube. Yes, excellent, I say, and point out they will need boots. Before I have finished my sentence, he is gone, outdoors in the wind and sleet in a single layer of cotton. I grab a lighter and wonder where we’re going to get wood dry enough on the frozen swamp of a woodpile. Now both kids have made it to the sleet-covered mulberry tree next to the fire pit, mad with glee at the thought of flames.

I put on the nine layers of clothing I can grab, stuff hand warmers in my pockets (I get reynaud’s if my fingers are exposed for more than six seconds, and this fire is going to take more than that long to persuade into being under the windy ice-drool the sky is spitting).

I bring my son’s jacket out and have to chase him with it for a while before the fire attempt can start. Then I remember certain knowledge of what it is that mom wants you to do is the death-knell of all compliance, and I leave the coat hanging off the dripping mulberry and turn to the fire pit.

In the disused pit, all the campfire wood from the fall is still stacked. Big rounds of downed yard wood, stacked waist-high, coated in ice. I toss the smallest ones off, examining them for viability. Some might burn, if we can get the fire hot enough. I get down to the bottom and the biggest heaviest rounds are frozen solid to the ground. I make the mistake of kicking one. I nurse my toe while I begin to build my son’s log-cabin gesture-specifications, LIKE THIS MOM, CH CH CH CH CH. On some of the CHs, the smaller rounds roll off each other into the charcoal mud, and he is irate about this, believing, I think, as usual, that I am plotting against him. But we keep at it and eventually have a lopsided, frozen chimney structure into which we can stuff the now only sort-of dry kindling material.

Newspaper and ripped up egg carton and the smallest of our sticks go down into the center, also knocking a few more ribs out of joint and incurring the irate reaction of the child who is now wearing the hood only of his coat, with it trailing out behind him through the half-frozen precipitation, arms flapping as though doing my job of chasing him disbelievingly. Very well, let the jacket do that job; I have a fire to start.

The wood hisses and spits and leaks steam and water and winter sadness. The lichen around its edges gives up slowly the moisture of its sad ice while thick stinking smoke erupts sideways somehow. The child is beyond delighted and begins stuffing wet leaves down the hole. Thus we begin, and thus we continue for several hours.

The crazed opera bird is thrilled, sets up wood rounds as jumps for racing kitties to do “through the worst of the smoke.” She has an imaginary game aesthetic that delights in the braiding of emergency situations, sporting skill, and the cuteness of small furry entities. For a moment she is able to goad her brother into racing around the smoke-pit, leaping in winter boots over the round-wood jumps she’s set up, but very soon he is drawn back to his god-given duty of stuffing wet leaves on top of my fire, trying to douse the very thing that is to save our lives until dinner.

“Combustion chamber,” he mutters, at different locations in jumbled sentences, as he stuffs the sodden oak leaves through a hole in a cinder block we have next to the fire and pokes them onto the flames with a long stick, very nearly tipping the block over onto the fire. I mention that he may not want to unseat the sort of leaning concrete, and how it could squash our fire and send sparks up that burn people. He hears zero of my words and sprints to get more leaves. I NEED TO FILL MY COMBUSTION CHAMBER.

His sister is sitting in a folding chair we’ve dragged out, which she has placed directly in the plume of smoke. She’s coughing and looking miserable. I ask if she wants to move. She is committed to her vacation spot. The knees of her stretch-pants are all muddy and icing over. She has made a “table” out of a wood round and one of the few pine board scraps I managed to find in the garage. She has placed the hot chai I made for the kids and brought out on top of this table, and if she forgets to put it directly in the center, it’ll go over.

Her brother stops making stinky wet smoke finally to sip the chai, which is excellent, because he specializes in hangriness and tends to refuse nutrient precisely when his brain most desperately requires it. He sits on his own folding chair and knocks the chai over. Then, instead of grabbing it, he watches it drain onto the frozen mud with outrage. MAMA he yells. THAT WAS NOT A GOOD PLACE TO PUT IT.

Soon their father comes out with what he’s been cooking up for our “cookout” back in the kitchen (he’s gone to the store while we’ve been working our smoke factory)— he’s brought onions and mushrooms to brown on a cast iron grill top, lamb burgers, and a blistered cherry tomato sauce with rosemary. This is the kind of meal our children are used to him making, over whatever fire we manage to conjure (likewise, they are used to snap peas and yogurt for dinner when I’m the chef). DAD LOOK AT MY COMBUSTION CHAMBER CAN WE ALWAYS KEEP THIS HERE LOOK ITS A COMBUSTION CHAMBER

Dad does his magic and we have a gourmet dinner on the sodden icy grass-mess beneath us, the sky adamant in its colorlessness and the east wind as foreboding as possible.

The children take a few bites. They go to get more wet leaves for the combustion chamber.

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