February, despised by many, is my favorite month. The world is gray, suiting my age and mood. Gray reminds us that we live in a web of ambiguities and that we’re fools to think in black and white.

At this time of year, nature sleeps. No grass to mow, no seeds to sow, no weeds to defeat. Chores are few: feed and water the chickens and dogs. Fetch the paper. Take down the trash. Only the temptation to make plans for the future disturbs the peace.

February is made for fireplace meditations. As one who only recently acquired a wood-burning fireplace, the job of building a fire inspires youthful enthusiasm – as well as grown-up dread. Every fire is unique and carries, along with the promise of warmth, the prospect of failure and a house full of smoke. In an attempt to achieve a grand effect, we built our fireplace too large. Consequently, it doesn’t draw well. To achieve success, I have to build a pyre in the hearth worthy of incinerating the body of a dead king. I’ve scored some memorable conflagrations this way – and terrified many a guest.

Like all fire builders, I have a little pyromania in my personality as well as some Promethean delusions. I like to imagine myself as an aboriginal shaman providing heat and light to my shivering clansmen in the dark, cold winter night, the flames lighting up their bewildered, savage faces and casting their leaping shadows against the wall of a cave.

Each fire has its own personality and all fires delight in turning on their would-be masters. You never know which way a fire will go. Oak burns more fiercely than hackberry or ash. Osage orange burns like coal and showers sparks. A gnarly cedar log with a few finger-like branches left on burns like a helium-filled blimp. Irregularities of individual logs and the way they’re stacked guarantee unpredictability. A gentle nudge with the poker can provoke a towering blaze or a sputtering shipwreck.

Few things are more pleasant that sitting before the fire on a weekend in February. The hiss of escaping gas, the pop and crackle of the logs draws the fire keeper’s attention away from his book into the depths of the ever-changing blaze. Think how many years of patient growth in the harsh environment of Kansas is represented in every log. It’s sobering to think of a century’s investment going up in an hour’s worth of flames.

The vivid blues, greens and yellows that flicker above the pulsing orange coals repeat the look of February sunsets that flare for a moment above the horizon before being swallowed up by night. The strange chirps, whistles and muted sighs that escape from the fire speak to us like the soul of the tree. Who knows what wild spirits trapped in a log are liberated when it burns?

Fires are metaphors for life, of course. Shakespeare described himself as a fire, “That on the ashes of his youth doth lie/As the deathbed whereon it must expire/Consumed by that which it was nourished by.” To keep on living we must burn ourselves up. A good fire leaves nothing behind but ash.

I heard some guru on the radio the other day claiming that unhappiness comes from clinging to this ephemeral world. Temporal existence is a nightmare of war and death, he said. Rather, we should seek to commune with the unseen, metaphysical world and the life of eternal peace and bliss. Many are attracted to this message, though it’s based on unknowable and unverifiable proofs. The promise of a higher reality, of greater knowledge and secret truths is seductive. But whether heaven’s gold-paved streets await us or the cold, dead silence of stones, most of us will take the here and now for the brief flicker of time we have it in our grasp.

At this time of year, flocks of geese congregate in our valley, already anxious to return north to their nesting grounds. I never get tired of watching them beating overhead against the wind, back and forth on their restless errands, filling the sky with their wild honks. If they’re not an emblem of the everlasting, what is?

I know that when the hooded figure comes, I’ll be as unready as anyone to go. I’ll cling to the bedpost until the last finger is pried loose and fly through the window with the flicker of hope that Yeats was right when he wrote, “A brief parting from those dear is the worst man has to fear.”