Natalie used to do this dramatic thing where she’d hiss the word “Fiaaaaah!” (“Fire!”) while scrunching up her face and framing it with hands (which were formed into claws). Well, the effect is lost in transcription. You had to be there, especially when she was a cute little 4-year-old towhead with blue eyes.

I like Fiaaaaah. It heats our house for free. It gets rid of wildfire fuel lying around on the ground. And I like playing with it. (Don’t tell anyone.)

The weather was dry enough last Saturday that I could finally start burning the big slash pile down by the greenhouse. It’s been moldering there for the better part of three years; in fact, it’s the last remnant of the pile o’logs left there when our land was thinned of timber. The logs are long gone and we’ve been dying to use that area. We want to smooth that area out, throw down some grass seed, and build a fire pit, but the slash pile remained, and it’s hard to landscape when you have a stack o’sticks four feet high and twenty feet long.

But the pile started with one match. The flames crackled encouragingly, growing bigger and bigger, burning despite a sprinkling of rain, and I merrily dragged sticks and dead saplings from hither and yon and threw them on. How nice to get all that dead stuff off the land before the new spring growth comes in. Clean it up! There’s still a lot out there, but we’ll need something for our summertime bonfires.

Then I spied the boat.

This boat had served our ducks well, for a while, as a duck pond. It came from the dump so it was free, and filling an old boat with water was easier than digging a duck pond into our rocky soil. But then I accidentally broke the back out, and the ducks got bored with it, and the whole interior turned algae-green. Then the water line froze up so we couldn’t refill it, and the remaining water grew a sickly greenish brown (when it wasn’t frozen), and the chickens started eating it. It’s a little hard to see, but toward the back (near Emma, who’s throwing a stick into the flames) you can see places where the chickens have peck the styrofoam out. Why? Only a chicken knows. They’ve also stopped laying, so maybe there’s a correlation. Maybe they’re all plugged up with styrofoam.

It was time to lose the boat. Rather than lash our old boat-cum-duck pond it atop the BGF for transport to the dump, I decided to immolate it. Goodbye, boat. You’ve served the duckies well, or you did for a while. Then you became ugly. You were never so beautiful as when you fed the flames. Your column of smoke was black and 100 feet high, I’d guess, but you’re gone now. So’s the slash pile, hallelujah.