Out of the frying pan and into the snow.

Early evening. 

Middle of winter. 

Snow a meter deep from a crisp mountain storm recently passed. 

In our small town everyone was inside, warm by their heaters, fireplaces, or wood stoves. Everyone except us. The four of us; my dad, my two brothers, and I. No, we weren't inside by our woodstove. We were outside, on our frontporch. We were outside, sweating. 

We were outside, standing in a meter of snow because our stove, Dad's stove, was a furnace. I don't mean it was the central heating type of furnace, I mean it was hot enough to melt metal. That fireplace must have been made of tungsten because tungsten has a melting point of almost 3500 degress celcius and Dad's furnace was probably a bit below that... but not by much. We stood out there, the radiant heat waves blowing past us and we wondered out loud how it could have possibly happened again. 

Why was it a weekly event that the house would turn into Dantes Inferno? Was Dad set on setting the house on fire?.. Secretly working on turning our two bedroom cottage into a plume of spontaneous combustion? Did he have some high payoff homeowners insurance that gave triple return if all contents were vaporized? 

We decided it was simply an attempt by Dad to keep the fire going all night long so he wouldn't have to start it again in the morning. We nodded in agreement at this theory while Dad himself was preoccupied with a rollie and pretended not to notice the speculations. We stood out there for an hour or two as the heat escaped from the front door and also from every window we had opened, which was every window. We kept chatting together and occasionally waving at the neighbors who drove by to get some side dish from the grocery store for their pot roast, or going to the local video store to rent a movie, or had just heard we were outside again and wanted to drive by for a friendly laugh. 

And, after the house became cool enough to touch, we would walk back inside. We would finish dinner. We would watch a movie. We would go to bed. But, just before falling asleep we would all hear Dad putting a few more logs on the fire.