my poor one track mind

28 January 2012

If at any given time someone asked you what you were thinking about, what is your most likely answer? Is there any topic that occupies your mind more than any other? Perhaps your family, your job, your golf swing, or maybe even food. I really want to know – what do you spend most of your time thinking about? Ultimately I’d love it if you posted your answer in the comment section below (signed or anonymous), but I don’t really expect to be indulged.

I will, however, regale you with my most common thought – fire. I don’t mean that in arsonist “I want to light everything on fire” sort of way, but I suppose that’s true in a way. My toes go numb despite three pairs of wool socks and slippers while starting my fire in the morning and I wear my winter coat to class sometimes so I do often have the almost overwhelming desire to light everything in sight on fire.

My stove and fire occupy almost every thought in my mind, both errant and conscious. When I wake up in the morning, my second thought (after “what is that horrible noise?”) is “I wonder if the coal is still going.” After making that first fire, I climb back into bed for the 20-30 minutes that it takes my ger to warm up, but I’m unable to fall back asleep. I spend that entire time with an ear turned toward my stove trying to judge the strength of the fire based on the crackling. If there are only infrequent pops, it’s a good sign that the kindling didn’t catch or that the wood is too wet to start a fire. Even if there are steady cracks and pops, I still can’t stop listening. Even now while I’m typing this in a chair pulled up next to the stove, I’m listening to the cracks wondering if it’s time to add more wood.

When I’m not at home, my thoughts are still drawn to my fire. On Mondays I’m gone from 10:30 to 5:30 and I worry that my cat will turn into a kitten popsicle. My hashaa family has even come to be concerned for her well-being so they sometimes offer to make a fire for me to keep the chill out. I don’t have classes in the morning from Tuesday to Thursday and I have a really long break on Fridays so I can maintain a steadier fire. Before I leave I wonder how much wood to put on so that there will still be embers going when I come back. While I’m gone, I wonder if the fire’s gone out yet. On the walk home, I hope that if the fire has gone out, it won’t take long to start up again. Before I go to bed, I line up the kindling for the morning so that I spend very little time fire-less.

My sleep routines are entirely dictated by my fire. Every time I’m in bed (not just in the mornings), I’m thinking about and listening to the fire. I can’t nap because I’m afraid the fire will go out while I’m asleep. The only way I can sleep in is if I hold off making a fire – the moment the fire is built, sleep is forfeit. I can’t go to bed early because the temperature would drop too much in the hours between when the fire would go out and when I got up.

It’s not really cold that occupies my mind. Provided I get the fire going well enough, I’m probably warmer than most PCVs who live in apartments. I can’t chop wood so my only laziness is putting on all of my winter gear to get more wood from outside. I think I’m more worried about the fire going out than any of the consequences. If the fire goes out then, yes, things would get chilly. But more importantly, it would mean having to start another fire.