Fire Pit Therapy

I'm always amazed at how quickly things can change here in NC.  Half a week ago it was hot and humid, so muggy we joked at morning bus duty about being able to cut the air with a knife.  Then Tropical Storm Michael passed, and since then we've had very comfortable afternoons with cool nights and mornings.  I've never been one to like the heat, so I'm thoroughly enjoying our current version of fall weather (I say "our current version" because I keep seeing the pictures my Vermont friends are posting of themselves bundled up in sweaters, down vests, boots and hats and think, "Yeah, that'll be me in January").

This morning I woke up having slept very comfortably under my new weighted blanket (I've had it a week and it's a game changer) in a chilly house.  The thermostat read 66° but I refuse to turn on the heat when it's still getting up to the mid to upper 70s during the day, so I decided to take the opportunity to sit out on the deck and burn things in my fire pit.

"Things?" you ask.  Yes, things.  I keep picking up twigs from around the backyard (there are plenty thanks to the winds of Michael) and dropping them in the fire pit.  They're great kindling.  So are the half eaten pecans the squirrels have left scattered over my deck.  Then I add logs from John's wood pile.  We've got quite a stack of wood that he cut up while he was still able to do so over the last several years.  In the 9 years that we were married we had to take down 4 trees in our back yard and he kept cutting them up and adding them to our wood pile.  We used to sit out on the deck, a fire in the fire pit, quite often during spring and autumn months.  I think we both found it relaxing, and it weirdly fulfilled my need to complete things.

John never could understand that need of mine.  It was one way in which we were very different.  I got great joy in using up every bit of body wash in a bottle, overjoyed on the day I got to recycle it, whereas he always had at least 3 different bottles going "because I might want a different scent today."  As I go through daily life without him I keep finding evidence in the kitchen pantry and bathroom cabinets of his need to try every possible version of something - 5 different types of hot sauce, 3 flavors of ketchup (I didn't even know there was more than one), 3 different scents of the same brand of perfume that he bought me (each year at Christmas he bought me another scent, saying "I thought you might like this one, too").  Now I'm torn - do I consume these things to fulfill my need to complete them or hold on to them as a way of remembering that he was here?

And so I rotate daily between the 3 perfumes (yes, there's a pattern - don't you know anything about me?) knowing that this Christmas there won't be another bottle, that someday they'll run out.  I see new flavors of Cheez-Its and think, "John would have to buy and try this."  And today I sit outside watching the fire pit that burns the wood that he cut  and piled for me, knowing that someday it will run out and the wood pile will be gone.

I live in a weird space, clinging desperately to the past and yet inching forward into the future.