Ember Months

I remember when I first realized that the two months that slope most deeply into darkness—at least here in the northern hemisphere—end in the word ember. I was about 11, huddled close to our wood stove to stave off the crippling autumnal chill (maybe 55 degrees farhenheit, nearly arctic by Hawaii’s standards) when the connection manifested in my mind. Staring into the fire’s glow, contemplating ember, I felt I had peered into the deep fabric of the universe, where names can’t help but mirror some intrinsic, ephemeral quality of things.

I felt very deep.

Of course, now, at the ripe and culturally crone-adjacent age of 37, I am certain that I am hardly the first to make this observation. And yet, I cannot help but linger over it with that same romantic wonder. The Ember Months. When the fire dies back to hold the light in trust until dawn. Don’t you feel it? Like you have upset the nap of the cosmic velvet and laid bare the weave beneath? I can’t quite shake it.

I found myself mulling over this memory as the weather here in Maryland turns truly cold. It is my first time witnessing the turn from summer to winter in its entirety in a while, having spent the last several autumns back in Hawaii, and so the magic of it is once again new. The hunkering down, the retreating into scarves and sweaters, the marshalling of internal heat; it all got me wondering again, where does that ember come from?

Then I remembered: I took Latin! The textbooks are right here on my shelf! Also, I have the internet in my pocket. I had neither of these things in my childhood home that night as I stared into the fire. Not only was our house utterly devoid of Latin textbooks, it was (and still is) off the electric grid, and my dad would never have let me turn on the desktop after dark when the solar panels weren’t pulling in energy. And honestly, looking for an answer back then didn’t even occur to me, much less would I have thought to consult AltaVista. Instead, I simply watched the fire and thought of embers.

But now, well, there is no reason why I cannot answer my primordial question: Whence the ember? The nov and dec are fairly intuitive, deriving from novum and decem, denoting the ninth and tenth months of the Roman calendar, which counted March as its first month. But the ember is not Latin, or at least, the second half isn’t. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, we have early French to thank for that glowing suffix, ber. (Like brrr, I can’t help but notice.) November and December were first Novembre and Decembre. The em is Latin, the bre is French, becoming ber in English. The ember, like the presence of fire itself on planet Earth, appears to be an accident.

Now, I am not a linguist, so I will refrain from digging any deeper into the etymology. But I find the embering of November and December to be no less rich for its coincidental nature. If it is an accident, it is a happy one, and I am grateful for it. The embers of the year approach the solstice as the hearth fire approaches midnight, with the intention of rousing with the new year, the new day. I am not saying anything original when I say I see hope in this, but I do, and I want to articulate why.

People don’t bother banking the fire if they think there is no tomorrow. If there is no tomorrow, why not let the fire burn itself out, let it die, or extinguish it entirely to better embrace the coming dark? (Not that darkness doesn’t have a beauty all its own, but that’s another post!) It is a profound thing, to believe that tomorrow will happen, that you will be here for it, and to prepare your immediate surroundings to help you meet it. That tomorrow is in no way guaranteed is knowledge which most of us simply cannot live with all day every day. But we do know it, to one degree or another, and yet… we bank our fires.

One could certainly interpret this assumption of future existence as a form of denial, psychological protection against the abject horror of our precarity, but I prefer to think of it as evidence of audacious hope. After all, the Ember Months are the time of advents as well as ancestors. We brazenly state that we expect to need our embers the following day and prepare them to be called upon to bring forth fire. We expect to be here, and we expect to have work to do. It is madness. Bright, beautiful madness. So, in these glowing months, what are we tending? What are we holding in trust against the cold? What are we choosing to keep alive with our breath as the things that hunt at night close upon our backs?

My embers are small, humble things. I try to remember that for all our modernity, or post-modernity, or post-post-post-modernity, we are small creatures, often moved by seemingly small things: Kindness, understanding, second chances, patience with the messiness of our humanity. Imperfectly, I send my breath into small gestures of love, fulfill small responsibilities, seek small wonders. Each choice a coal held upon the tongue. In the labyrinth of my heart, I tend my little hearth, remembering that I may yet live many years, and that this older woman whom I have yet to meet, who lives in a world I cannot know, may well have need of fire.

The image for this post is a detail from Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones’s “Hero.”