Every summer we burn. I’m ten, and the large wide ditch outside our house in the country is thick with hot-pink fireweed, swaying fronds of sweetgrass with their seedy feathered heads, pointed junegrass, tinkling bluebells, and a thin vine-like flower that our mother calls honeysuckle and puts to our lips to squeeze the sweet nectar into. The ditch is a buzzing mess of drunken bees that nod and dip into the sweating centers of blooms until they’ve had their fill and stumble home to a hive somewhere in the woods.
Once, I find lilies. Bright orange lilies like the kind my grandmother plants outside her farmhouse, with thick waxy petals, powdery pollen that falls into outstretched palms, and dark brown freckles that gather into the deep throat of the flower. I find them hidden on the edge of the underbrush that my dad has cleared, where the lawn meets the creeping forest that every year moves closer and closer to the house until we beat it back again.
The ditch at the start of our long driveway fills with the runoff from melting snow in the early spring. Water travels from one ditch to the next through a metal culvert that connects each yard to the other until it’s all deposited in some secret destination. Along the wet banks, the frogs return from their tombs of frozen mud and lay their eggs in the cold water. They sing over them at night under a sky the temperature of their blood. By the time the meltwater drains off, the tadpoles have absorbed their tails, grown legs, and made the move to the bigger pond across the road, though we sometimes find, even in late spring, little green frogs the size of a quarter that hop like a panic away from our hands and back into grassy homes.
Close to the top of the ditch where the growth meets the gravel subdivision road are the foxtails that we pick on walks with our mom. We tickle her freckled brown arms and the back of her neck with them and then stop to pick bouquets of red clover so fragrant and thick in their honey scent that on summer afternoons the shimmering heat fills our mouths with the taste of flower. Everywhere is wildness.
Late summer, when the water is finally gone from the ditches and the heat has dried the ground to a hard-packed black, when the grasses have lost their mint green and turned toward golden, we gather rakes, buckets, pockets full of matches. Our dad stands on the edge of the road near the foxtails and clover and lights the first match. He pulls up nearby grasses with a rake and feeds the flame until it’s crackling and hungry, rolling its way through the ditch, through the weeds. And then we, the children, each light our own small fires, spread their circumferences with our rakes, and call on our father and his big work boots when our fires begin to burn beyond our boundaries and beyond our control.
One summer, I accidentally set a telephone pole on fire. I run with Chris, Caroline, and Kim with pails full of pond water while my dad yells in a panic and swats at the fire with his rake. The heat is terrifying and the flames as tall as I am. The lilies drop like bombed buildings and burn to ash, the foxtails curl and pop, the little frogs hop across scorched ground for safety. When we finally put it out, the pole is blackened up to as high as my father’s head. He’s mad at me for a while but eventually makes a joke of it that he tells and retells to all his friends.
Every summer, we burn more than we mean to. Into empty lots. Past the ditches and into our swath of trees, and more moments of panic and angry shouts, stomping boots, and rakes flying fast. But when we’re finished and the fires are out, the ditches look smaller and emptied, smooth and knowable, the mysteries there burnt off with the rest.
My dad scatters grass seed over the ground, and each day after, we wait and check, wait and check, until one morning, always sooner than seems possible, there’s the return of that bright lime green arguing back through the sooty ground again. In a week, it’s covered in new growth, and for the rest of the summer and into the fall, Mom will mow the ditches and keep the grass short and trim for a close-cropped lawn until cooler weather comes and autumn rains collect and pool in the bottoms of the ditches and make mowing impossible again. A few wildflowers creep back, and the grasses grow long, bloom feathery heads of seed. Turn yellow and ripen and drop.
In the spring, after the thaw and melt, the rising creek and resurrected frogs, the fireweed is always the first flower to bloom again, tall and pink and stubborn, though every season there are fewer of them, more of the seeded grasses taking over, and the lawn is much easier to mow, the forest easier to keep at bay. Eventually, the burning stops altogether and the returning fireweeds stop too, bent to our will like we are Nature, or time itself, directing their existence with our forced evolution of land. A smooth green lawn returns in the tidy ditch each spring like the rolled-out carpet of plastic turf I see at the first funeral I attend—the way it covers the mound of dirt piled and waiting to return to where it came from—helping us pretend we can keep the wildest things at bay for good.
From The Evolution of Fire by Angela Pelster, Milkweed Editions, 2026.
