It wasn’t our first fire but it was our biggest. After a season of pulling vines from the tops of apple trees, unwinding woody stems from struggling saplings and ripping out orange roots from the forest floor, we accumulated an estimated 25 pickup truck loads of invasive Asian bittersweet. All through the autumn, as the construction crews worked on our house, we toiled on the edge of our first field to liberate the trees. The refuse we dumped in a huge pile on a section of the field where another invasive, Japanese knotweed, once grew. Nils cut it back and we had the double the pleasure burning the bittersweet today on that site.

The weather has been wet so it was easy to get a fire permit. The end of the year and a snowy forecast made the day feel festive, despite the grey skies and wintry mix that fell from them. It took six hours to burn all the brush but our spirits were buoyed by the help we received from our friend Jery from Scarborough and neighbor Chris from up the hill.