Mary Belk: Spring weather has become unpredictable

The last fireplace fire of the season should be a time of celebration — a gathering of family and friends, the breaking of bread, the sharing of stories, the singing of songs.

But no matter how much the weatherman claims to know about the weather, no matter how hard I listen, how carefully I watch the sky and check the thermometer, the weather just isn’t predictable.

This year’s winter has been as random as any I can recall. There were a few frosty days in November and December, but we lit logs sparingly, hoarding the hardwood, saving it for thermometer-dipping nights in January and February. And, yes, we had some lovely red-hot fires. But those two-dog nights were few and far between. So now the woodpile is still as straight and tall as a Nutcracker soldier.

Problem is I can’t figure if cold weather is over or not. And if so, did we have the last fireplace fire of the year and not know it?

We never had home fires burning when I was a little girl. My daddy grew up in the days when heating and cooking were done by the wood-stove method. He didn’t see the appeal of leaping flames racing up the chimney, and he couldn’t fathom why in the world anybody would chop and split wood when there was a perfectly good heat pump attached to the house.

There have been times in my adult life when I used the fireplace for practical purposes. Times when icy rain blew in from Yankee-land and covered the electric lines layer upon layer until they snapped. With no electric heat, the family hearth became our only source of warmth. I used the orange coals to boil pans of water for brewing coffee in an old drip-o-lator, and roast hot dogs or toast bread on straightened coat hangers. But mainly we’ve built family fires for our own creature comfort. Fires to sit close to while we played Boggle or put together jigsaw puzzles. Fires to look at for pure pleasure.

I never take a single fire for granted. After everyone else has gone to bed for the night, I drag in one more log and shove it into the simmering coals. I’m not skilled at stoking fires, but I work hard, adding a bit of kindling and a wad of newspaper, prodding and pulling with the poker.

Once the flames begin to jump, I scoot a soft chair close to the hearth, and armed with a cup of tea and a good book, I stay until the ashes grow cold.

Thing is, I want to make the last fire of the season an event. But I can’t be sure there’ll be another cold, rainy night.

There’s a Web site that promises a weather forecast up to a year in advance with 83 percent accuracy. I’m supposed to be able to log on and find out when the last fireplace fire of the season will be.

They swear they know. We’ll see.

Mary Belk lives in Auburn and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News.