Today's drama unfolded in multiple parts. First was waking up shivering to realize that the heat had once again gone out. Then there was the call to the home warranty company to get someone to come fix the heat. Lots of hold music. Lots of waiting. Eureka a live person, arrangements made for service. Ta Da. Hours pass. Still cold. No word from the plumber. Then calling the plumber to see if they were actually coming out. They weren't. Not until Monday. Then more shivering and being cold. Aha but I could light a fire in the fireplace. Then there were the bodies. Sooo many bodies.
I guess I should elaborate a bit on this last point. After sitting around the house for most of the afternoon shivering and being generally cold and watching the temperature continue to drop I had the sudden realization that I had this amazing fireplace contraption thing in my living room in which you could put flammable combustible materials and with the right combination of heat and air could create wonderful glorious heat and light. I shall call it Fire.
But I had frittered my summer away doing meaningless pointless things like stripping wallpaper and taming ivy rather than preparing for the hard winter ahead. If only I had listened to the Ant. He is surely ready for the winter. But wait, all is not lost. Legend tells of a grand magic castle not far from here. A Depot of all things Home (if you will). So we will embark on a quest, nay a great pilgrimage to the mighty Depot of Home to gather together the various components of "Fire".
But first we must inspect this magic rectangular box that will contain the fire. I opened the flue and was showered with an accumulation of dirt and soot. After getting the flue damper out of the way and getting a flashlight up into the chimney I found that the chimney itself didn't look that dirty, there was just an accumulation of stuff on the ledge behind the flue. Not to fear, I'll just break out the trust shop-vac and we'll be all set and ready to begin our quest for "Fire".
At first, things went fine with the whole cleaning process. The shop-vac sucked mightily, pulling up all sorts of accumulated stuff. And then there was a thump and the motor on the shop vac groaned under the load of having something clogging the inlet. This is a rather unique sound and almost never is the pre-cursor of something good. You never wave the vacuum wand under the couch and have it bog down on a random fat wad of cash you've been looking for. It either fully ingests whatever expensive or rare item that you didn't want to fish out of the belly of the vacuum or else pulls up something gross. It never really seems to want to pull in and consume the gross stuff though that just gets stuck to the end of the nozzle for you to deal with. In this instance I could tell it had suctioned something to the front of the hose but had refused to ingest it. This as I have just described does not bode well. I pulled the hose back into view to find the carcass of a squirrel blocking the end. This was, to say the least, a little creepy. I now had a long-dead squirrel to deal with.
Now that my task had changed from just a quick cleaning to having to deal with a body I soldiered on an moved ahead. THWUNK- eeaaahhhhhh. Another victim. With the discovery of a second body I decided to re-equip myself for full crime scene investigation rather than just light duty dusting and cleaning. With the proper gear in place I ventured a hand up into the chimney and felt around. There were more bodies.
In the end, the body count totaled six. I don't know if I just live in a neighborhood filled with especially dissatisfied and depressed squirrels or if my chimney top is to squirrels what a venus-fly-trap is to bugs. Either way, it is really really freaking creepy to discover 6 dead bodies in your house. It doesn't really matter what kind of bodies they are. I guess, to be fair, that if they had been human bodies it probably would have been a bit more creepy and probably would have involved the police department and an action news team or two instead of a trash bag and some rubber gloves.
With the chimney cleaned out, the bodies unceremoniously put out at the curb, and ordered restored I was finally able to continue my quest. As you can see above the fire did work out quite nicely. I finally sat on the couch and enjoyed a few minutes of hard won quiet and warmth. It is really beautiful to sit and watch the flames dance and leap; the light dappling the room as if it were dancing with the shadows. Although the fireplace really puts far more heat up the chimney than into the room, there is still some primal response wired deep into our brains that is calmed and soothed by the fire. Fire is the bringer of light and warmth and safety from the dark and cold of the night. It even managed to keep the squirrels at bay.