Ten years burning

Shortly before my decade based birthday, my wife and I were sitting at a fire in our backyard. It was the last fire of the season and, terribly sad to see the season go, we stuck to it into the full dark, burning wood down into a deep pile of pure, burning embers. The fire, start to finish, was the exact color of Halloween.

No hint of yellow or red or blue. Orange. All unmitigated, glowing Halloween orange.

I was looking into the fire and saw a lovely chunk of wood that had been consumed by the now gone flames. Its shape and form were still there, but as pure heat, fuel, soul. It was something other than wood now, and yet one could perfectly see its construction, like a ghost, its tree source, the layers of its original fibers and the history of its slow assembly. Ten small slabs were woven together in this little chunk of wood. My tree biology is just good enough to know that this showed ten years, ten years of growth and life burning down to ash in my fire. 

"Those are my years." I thought. "My ten years."

And so a decade goes, burned and lovely, and we start a new one.