Who Tends the Fire

Every night of the camping trip, while the other children slept, Yara's grandmother stayed up to tend the fire. Yara woke once, near three in the morning, and found her grandmother exactly where she always was — sitting close to the flames, feeding them small pieces of wood, one at a time, with the patient attention of someone doing something far more important than it looked.

"Why don't you sleep?" Yara whispered, crawling out to sit beside her.

"Someone has to keep it alive," her grandmother said. "If I sleep, the fire goes out, and everyone wakes up cold before dawn. It's not a big job. It's just a constant one."

"Doesn't it get boring? Just sitting here, watching it burn?"

Her grandmother considered this. "I don't think of it as watching. I think of it as guarding something everyone else gets to forget about, because I'm here doing it for them. Your cousins are warm right now and don't even know to be grateful, because they've never once woken up cold. That's the whole point of tending a fire well — the people you're warming shouldn't have to think about it at all."

"That seems like a lonely job."

"It can be," her grandmother admitted. "But it's also a kind of love that doesn't need anyone to notice it to be real. I don't tend this fire to be thanked. I tend it because in the morning, everyone will wake up warm, and that's the whole reward — not gratitude, just the simple fact of it having worked."

Yara stayed up with her that night, learning how to feed a fire without smothering it, how to read which log needed turning, how to listen for the particular crackle that meant the flame was hungry again.

Years later, grown, at her own family's campsite, Yara found herself the one awake at three in the morning, feeding small pieces of wood into a fire while everyone else slept warm and unaware. She thought of her grandmother and smiled, understanding finally, from the inside, what the job had actually been.