There are so many things that we should be doing that we don't. We should, for example, be down at the beach, basking on the sun-drenched shores of the Ligurian Riviera -- but instead we are at the Ikea in Pisa buying potholders. We should be travelling around to all the famous towns in Tuscany, soaking in art and culture -- but instead we are going down to the pub again and talking with the guys about the new stop signs in town. And given that we have three (3) fireplaces and a never-ending supply of cut wood neatly stacked and waiting for us to use, we should be having fires on rainy days.
So yesterday we did.
I'm a little skittish about the fires because we had about half a dozen of them last winter and half the time they were merry and bright and cozy and the other half, they filled the house with smoke and we had to open all the windows to clear it out and sit there in our coats, blowing on our fingers to keep them warm.
So during the intervening summer, we have asked around (mostly at the pub) for fireplace tips.
We have been told to burn a small piece of paper first to check if the chimney is "drawing" before we go full-on inferno. We have also been advised to light a very miniscule fire and let it burn a bit to "warm up" the chimney first before moving on to larger conflagrations.
We did both of these things, hovering over a crumpled piece of smoldering printer paper with the flashlights from our phones trained on it and gazing at the smoke like a couple of very intense soothsayers from Ancient Greece. Then we lit a large pine cone and watched it burn. The smoke from both went happily straight up the chimney. All systems go.
So we built a roaring blaze and fifteen minutes later, the living room was filled with smoke and I was actually getting rained on sideways while the wind whipped through the now opened windows and washed over me where I was sitting on the couch.
Today, everything in the house smells like beef jerky. But it was lovely while it lasted.
