On a night that's below fifty degrees, I'll build a fire, a crackling dance of light and warmth that fills our home with a primal comfort. We human beings evolved with fire, and evolved to delight in fire, and the place of the hearth in our lives only changed during my parents generation. After countless millennia, the scent of carbonizing oak or pine or sycamore has been supplanted by the cool glow and flicker of our screens, the soft time of story and quietness around the open flame replaced with the bingbamboom bustle of one thing after another, scrolling ever downward.
It's a loss, it is, because in our frenetic rushing about we are forgetting things.
Like what ash is, and what ash does.
In our disposable age, we assume that when we have used a thing up, it no longer has worth. We toss aside teratons of plastic nothings. We crumple wrappers, we plan for obsolescence, we create a wastestream, a Heraclitan torrent of the unvalued and forgotten.
But ash isn't waste. Ash isn't worthless. Nothing God makes is waste, even the greyblack remains of the flame. It only seems so because we now think in shallow, rushing, wasteful ways, flinging ourselves from moment to moment and missing the whole.
When I clean out my hearth, I do not discard the ashes. Ashes are precious to a gardener, rich with calcium and carbon and micronutrients. Ashes are pitchforked into my compost. Ashes feed my garlic, plumping the bulbs that have been patiently enduring the winter. Ashes enrich the soil in which my asparagus grows, and a diet of carbon can keep them yielding for decades. I'm setting three small beds aside for a new plant this year. I'm eager to experiment with okra, a plant that is remarkably nutritious, easy to seedsave, beautifully ornamental, and will adapt well to our rapidly warming Midatlantic.
What does okra love? Okra loveslovesloves wood ash.
To appreciate ash, one must be unhurried about it. Over patient years, you learn the richness it adds to the earth, come to know the living things that thrive and grow as they take that ash into themselves. When you smell the cut garlic on your fingers, snap the first spear of asparagus in the spring, or taste the nutty crunch of fried okra?
You see the value in what the fire has left behind, and that life has reclaimed and made its own.
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