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	The Woodstove by Jennifer Grotz The woodstove is banked to last the night, its slim legs, like an elegant dog's, stand obediently on the tile floor while in its belly a muffled tumult cries like wind keening through the hemlocks. Human nature to sleep by fire, and human nature to be sleepless by it too. I get up to watch the blue flames finger soft chambers in the wood while the coals swell with scintillating breaths. What made Rousseau once observe that dogs will not build fires? (And further, that in the pleasing warmth of a fire already started, they will not add wood?) What is it to be human? To forge connection, to make interpretations of fire and contain them in a little iron stove? And what is it to be fire? To burn with indifference, to consume the skin of the arm as easily as the bark of a log. Sleepy warmth begins to fill the room in which life wants to live and fire wants to burn, the room which in the morning will hold a fire changed to cooling ash. Outside, smoke escapes and for an instant mirrors nature too, the way falling snow reveals the wind's mind, and change of mind, before world and mind grow inscrutable again.

From NPR The Writers Almanac today