Why the Name Furrow and Fire
The meanings these words hold for me
Possibility. Furrow and fire suggest it, yet not without something being spent.
Furrows require sweat and time. If the turned soil lacks nutrients, or rain and sunlight don’t arrive in the right portions, seeds planted there won’t grow. There is interdependence in furrow—and chance.
Farming runs in both lines of my ancestry. Though the skills didn’t take root in me, something tugs when I pass pastures, barns, or freshly tilled fields. What might this next chapter yield? What furrows have I plowed? What might I sow? How hard am I willing to work? How much of the harvest rests on elements I don’t control?
Furrow also holds echoes. It’s one of the wonderments of words. How they are at once themselves and every word their sounds evoke for the person who hears them. In this moment, along with grow, I hear tomorrow in this bowl of a word, burrow and sorrow, glow, owe and oh. This tension feels true, a mixture that could make a brow furrow deep as those soil seams. What do you hear?
And what then, of fire?
Fire consumes as it glows. Contained, it can comfort for hours, cozy, mesmerizing. Unbridled it burns acres to ash. Will the fire in my next chapter crackle in a hearth or campfire, embers roasting corn or foil-wrapped potatoes? Or will getting there require flames that cinder tree trunks and blacken the ground?
Fire is here for its dance and danger. Will I stoke a deferred passion with the kindling it needs to roar? Discover something I didn’t know I could do? Incinerate something treasured in the process of trying? Build a fire that brings warmth to people close to me or ones I don’t yet know?
Fire crackles with briar and drier, its cry melting to two syllables that sound closer to far on some Southern tongues. There’s ire and mire in it, tire’s road readiness and weary sighs, hire, gyre, and die—the ultimate bookend. And for my body, a fire after. This is about the fire before.
