We enter now the quiet and sooty weeks of February in Sullivan. During the short days we locals hurry about our daily tasks—the visit to ShopRite or the Transfer Station or Town Hall. Early and late we tend to our dependents: our chickens, our babies, our five- and ten- and fifteen-year-olds, our pigs and goats, our cats and dogs. We are busy. Still, no kidding: one could despair. February is a time when every sentient being in the Northern Hemisphere has time to think and we think too much. It is cold and snowy and icy and foggy. Song birds freeze to the bough at night in the sleet. It is cruel but it is true.

Locals go to bed at a wonted hour, some at 6:00 PM, some at 8:00 PM, some at midnight or 2:00 AM or 3:00 AM. (If at 4:00 AM, you are listening to WJFF late-night music, best on the planet at any hour). After shut-eye, the world divides. Some homes are heated with a furnace. Others, like mine, are heated all night long with a wood-burning stove. We wood-stovers have a nighttime rhythm which helps with the cruelty of the days and gives shape to our nights. Without any kind of alarm, we roll back the covers at 2:00 or 3:00 or 4:00 AM and rise to stoke the hearth. How is this possible? Are we sleepwalkers? It’s a mystery. We just get up and stoke as if programmed to the task.

Moments spent stoking the stove in the middle of the night are some of the most beautiful and pensive of the entire winter. One studies the existing fire before opening the door: how best to approach it. A subtle orange glows along one log inside the stove. The fire is going out but any log could fall out if you open the door! One moves carefully. To the wood pile, then. You pick and choose the quoits carefully. Are they thin and quickly flammable? Best if they are angular or shattered and shaggy. If the quoit is heavy it is still moist inside and a bad choice. Is the bark blackened and breaking off? This one will do.

You open the stove door and place the quoits strategically, careful to push burning embers to the back of the combustion chamber. For minutes on end there’s furious billowing smoke; then a snakish tongue of orange-blue shoots out from the fresh logs. Soon the magic, the power and heat and light of the sun locked within the wood, emerges. Back to bed.

In the middle of the night, as the stove creaks and clangs, our fears and hopes are most present. We gaze at the fledgling flame and all our struggles are over; now there is only the flame itself to give us light in the darkness and the strength and purpose to continue. In darkness we sometimes see the best. See the flame how it surges forward, sputters and grows in the darkness along the length of the log. We are more than songbirds. All will be well.