It’s cold outside, the kind of cold that makes you want to close the slider in back when you step out to fetch a few logs but your bare hand sticks to the door handle. Just a little bit, enough that you notice, not so much that it takes the skin off your palm.

Gloves would help. You have gloves of various thicknesses and styles, big thick gloves for running the snowblower when it’s single digits and blowing hard, fuzzy cozy gloves, thin wool gloves that they said you could use with your phone’s touch screen, and though they don’t work with touchscreens any better than the snowblower gloves, they have cheerful yellow magnets on the cuffs that help them stick together, and you appreciate them for that. Also a pair of sleek thin leather gloves that were on sale at Marshall’s for $19.99, and you bought them 20 years ago to match a gray wool overcoat that you’ve since misplaced or given away. All these gloves live in a bin by the front door. You think surely you could spare a pair to keep next to the slider in the back. But they’d end up in a drawer in the little cabinet by the door and your adult children would find them someday years from now, because you’d forget about them.

The cold came with snow, and as you’re clearing snow you think about a Tolstoy short story, “The Snowstorm,” and you know it’s about a journey by sleigh that ends badly but you still think the Russians had a point with all their sleighing since sleighs don’t mind if there’s a foot of snow on the driveway. You think, too, about time. How the storm has made a hash of the things you’d scheduled, snowing all day and still snowing as it gets dark but you go out and clear some of it, knowing that doing it all in one stretch tomorrow would exhaust your body and your snowblower, which has heart and courage but wasn’t built for this. Nor were you, perhaps. You’re not getting younger, and you wonder whether you’ll still be clearing snow in five or 10 years. The optimists say AI will cure disease and drive the cars that get you home even if you’ve had a few drinks. But you don’t know how AI will deal with snow, in which case, what’s the point, really? Then a neighbor texts you an ad for a robotic snowblower. You reply “haha.”

It’s cold, so you’re sitting in the living room in front of the wood stove. You think about how fire, imprisoned in a cast iron box, is beautiful, mesmerizing, a welcome companion. And how fire uncontained wants only to destroy. Like when your great grandparents’ house burned to ashes and almost took your three-year-old grandfather with it, and with him, your existence. But your great grandfather gathered his son from his tiny bed, whispered to him not to worry and carried him through the thickening smoke downstairs out through the back door. You imagine the child plucked at his father’s dark beard, still sleepy and not sure what the commotion was about. It was a night in January, cold even in West Texas, where they lived. You wonder if they had time to grab coats and gloves, or if they just stood close to the burning house to stay warm. You remember reading an old newspaper article about that fire, which mentioned that the house and its contents were insured, but you know there was no insurance for the memories that disappeared with the house.

You look at the fire in your stove, its slender flames stabbing up from the log you added a half hour ago, orange coals beneath, an arc of soot creeping down the glass in front so you can’t see the tips of the flames anymore. You wonder if the fire needs another log. But you’re writing. You can’t be distracted.

Stuart Mieher lives and sometimes writes in Montague.