mix tapes

Dum dee dum dee dum dee dum
Dum dee dum dee dum dee dum

We are lying on a futon that we have dragged out of the rec room and placed on the hardwood floor in front of the woodstove. The door to the woodstove is open-it is a massive piece of black iron, and in my life prior to the one that now includes the man I'm with, my ex-husband used to say both in terms of complaint and compliment that the heat it produced was too much stove for the tiny two-bedroom ancient saltbox we lived in. The house, built in 1810, didn't have a particularly efficient furnace, so most days, we had stoked the stove with some of the five cords of wood we bought every summer-wood that was dumped in the driveway and then required an entire day devoted to stacking it carefully under the cover of the rickety shed adjacent to the house, and we would open the bedroom doors and allow the woodstove to heat us in the ways that the original tenants had used the long-since bricked-over fireplace.
My lover and I are lying on the futon, watching the mixture of hardwoods-oak, birch, sycamore, but mostly maple-burn red hot. The temperature gauge on the stove pipe is near 400 degrees, and I get up every now and then to check and make sure it's not going much above that. I don't feel a need to poke at the fire, rearrange the wood. I'm not terribly interested in efficiency. I simply want heat, light, and to not allow the fire to become so hot that I risk starting a fire somewhere in the pipe or chimney.