The Ceremonies of the Everyday

October 16, 2025

The Ceremonies of the Everyday: My Wood-burning Stove

Five years ago, when I first saw the little house I bought, I fell in love with it — except for the weird fireplace of orange metal that dominated the big main room that I envisioned as my office. Fortunately, the man who inspected my house told me it was very unsafe and I should never use it. When I asked about getting a wood-burning stove to replace it, he said that would be fine, provided I also installed the proper backing and platform for it. 

So that is what I did. I had never had a wood-burning stove, so it took some practice for me to learn what works to get a good fire going, how to confine the heat as much as possible to that one room, and to begin the practice of collecting kindling throughout the year from twigs and branches that fell from the trees in my yard. Together, the stove and the fire have responded and expressed their preferences. As I told the man who came last year to clean the chimney, “The stove teaches me what it needs.”

The stove, and the fire it nourishes and encourages, also remind me daily of the pleasure that ordinary tasks can offer. I love the ritual of going outside to the wood rack, even on cold mornings, and filling my canvas caddy with wood that spent the summer being warmed and dried by sunny southern breezes. I love cleaning out the stove in the morning, putting aside chunks of charcoal, some still sparkling with the remnants of the previous fire, to serve as the base for the next one. Every day I thank the fire as it flares up from the kindling, and I thank the stove as my chilly office begins to warm.

It’s so easy to take for granted the daily tasks that compose a life. And yet they make that life possible. Moreover, they describe who we are, our particular selves who create certain places for things in our home, go about our ordinary business in a certain way, make little priorities.

What tasks are the ceremonies of your life?