There are going to be eight of us for dinner. Besides Dad and Dennis and the three kids and myself, I’ve invited Sally and Purse from next door. They’re older than we are, just halfway in age between Dad’s seventy-five and my thirty-four, and their two kids have grown up and moved east. Purse is a commodities dealer, oil seeds mainly, and Sally’s been selling real estate for the last eight years. She’s good at it. She’s already made it into the Million Dollar Club. She had her membership key imbedded in a silver disc and wears it like a brooch on the lapel of her coat. Dad gets a kick out of her. He really likes to get her going, and she eggs him on. He can’t believe the prices of houses in Winnipeg, what people will pay for jerry-built construction and hanky-sized lots. Last week, never mind the slow December market, Sally sold a house in Tuxedo for half a million dollars, and it didn’t even have a full basement. The heating bills for this particular house are more than Dennis and I pay every month for our mortgage and taxes combined, but then our heating bills are pretty high too. Like everyone else around here, we switched from oil to gas a few years ago. This is a cold climate. You’ve got to put out a lot of your income on heat in this part of the country, but every night, from September to May, we have a fire in our fireplace, and I like to think that that takes some of the burden off the furnace.

Most of our friends who have fireplaces use them maybe three or four times a year. Cordwood’s expensive, they say, but then they admit it’s really the mess and bother of cleaning out the ashes. I do it fast first thing in the morning, a little whisk broom and dustpan and a metal pail for the ashes. I can clean our fireplace in three minutes flat, I’ve timed myself. The ashes I save to put on the garden in the springtime.