Spinning Pins

The chimney pins the house down and opens it to the weather. It is a vertical edifice, slim or hipped, reaching through the center of the house or anchoring an edge. Through the chimney the house exhales, a workaday dragon. The chimney is a pin in the time of a particular house, foundation-steady while wingchairs and family members come and go around it. And it pins all houses--the original center of the hearth, commonly punching through human roofs. (Needs for food and heat link years and far-flung persons; gods or clocks have occupied the mantle.)

In its belly are the ministrations of housekeeping--fire-tending and, therefore, stews bubbling and water boiling and hands rubbing--and up through its lengthy, unseen interior chamber travel the atmospherics of the human domestic, byproducts of common necessity, daily emissions. Our breakfasts and teas and lye: their usefulness fills the volume of our houses but their ethereal and material signatures rise, billow, escape and rejoin the clear air above. So chimneys link the solid bottom of the hearth--the flat, sooty site of utility and economy--with what is most inaccessible and intangible--the sky.

And when the painter and the weaver, after the first hailstorm of summer, lean to listen at the opening of the fireplace, they hear the white noise of the flooded creek, muted but distinctive, carried down the chimney to their ears.