Flickering thoughts

(My fireplace tonight. Yes, many of these apartments have working fireplaces. Jefferson would have approved.)

Ivy Gardens, the sprawling complex by Darden, at times feels like the dorms. Say, at 7:52 a.m., when I join the stream of bundled students with backpacks. We look like turtles lugging around shells, I think to myself.

Other times — say, when the fire gets crackling — Ivy reminds me of the delicious pleasures of being an adult.

When I was a child, I hated fires.

They always appeared to me like devilish flames, mischievously waiting to leap from the brick to the carpet to the Christmas tree. When Dad would pull back the metal curtain to move around the logs, I'd flee from the room. I didn't trust the fire.

But now, somehow, I love it. The flame holds a steady calmness. A timeless, hypnotic glow.

Even the prep is a treat. I love arranging the balled-up Wall Street Journals, a starter brick, the wood into a "log-cabin style" — like assembling a gingerbread house. I love striking the match and watching the bits of fire lick the newspaper and dance around, until a blaze is humming and hissing. I love curling up in an armchair, reading about Brazil in 2003 or Piaggio in the 1990s, by the warm snap-crackle-pop.

And then I get all philosophical. The fire reminds me of how far humanity goes back. I think of cave men huddled around a ring of rocks, or colonial women in aprons cooking over the fire, or all the people across the world tonight staring into flames.

How far we are. How close we are.

The flame always reminds me how much I've changed. Or more importantly, how many things stay the same.