The Sonoran Desert is cooling down now. Latent heat stored in the cliffs and stones no longer replenished as the sun rises later and sets sooner, thermal energy escaping to deep space when one side of our planet hides from the sun in its own shadow. This eternal game of Sun ‘n Moon will continue until our parent star tires of the chase and swells to swallow our planet whole.

The gentle gusts that accompany autumn feel different, smell different. They invigorate the senses in a way that tingles my spine, invoking memories of dry maples leaves crunching under foot in Nebraska and the smell of apple cider, orange, cinnamon and cloves boiling on our wood burning stove. One of my most fond memories as a child is helping my father chop wood for the winter. He wore a gray sweatshirt jacket with a hood, blue jeans, and hiking boots which where rare in Nebraska where cowboy attire was the norm. He was strong and able then in his 40s, and remains so in his 80s, now chopping tree roots after a storm topples a mesquite in the otherwise impenetrable soil of the Valley of the Sun.

Tonight I lit a fire in my wood burning stove for the first time this season. I knew tonight was the night not by a calendar date nor a calculated change in temperature, rather it just felt like the right time. The satisfaction is much deeper than what my senses immediately convey, as though I am comforted at an ancestral level, a hundred generations responding to the pending winter in the very same way.

With bucket in hand I walk beneath a star lit sky to the wood pile, cut and chopped this spring and summer from the fallen, dead, and dying of seventeen acres of mesquite forest, inside of thousands more. This is a truly renewable resource and with a high efficiency stove, low in particulates too. I’ll chop more mid winter, sharing the task with my partner Colleen and visitors who may have chopped wood as a child but their city dwellings depriving them of the satisfaction of their own labor providing heat for an entire season.

I recognize that there are now too many people for all of us to heat our homes in this manner, but I made the choice to live in the wilderness, an hour from the nearest town in order to go to sleep with a fire for the ancestors, the comfort of a millennium, and a warmth that continues to glow ’till dawn.