“So where should we put the fire pit?” It was an unassuming question from Rich, but he was poking the dragon.
Home early from work and sitting in the warm Spring sun with him, my immediate response was, “Don’t get me started! We have enough projects going.” I suggested we get the one we’d seen at Lowe’s instead. To which, he shot back with, “Yeah, but that’s not what we do.”
He was right.
Within 10 minutes we had the shovels and wheelbarrow out and we set to work. We located it perfectly in the social center of our outdoor hang space. Now, someday we may step up our game and use cement to build up a more substantial one, but like I said, we have a lot of projects going and we needed this sooner rather than later. Pit dug, we headed out in the “homestead utility vehicle” (that would be my ’05 Matrix, of course) to fetch the necessary rocks from down the road.
After three trips, we had ourselves quite a nice pile of fieldstones and I’m thinking it’s pretty clear that without cement this going to be a very basic structure. We started with the biggest rocks and began laying them around the brick floor we’d put down… and there she was! In my mind, I could just see the sleeping dragon wrapped around our fire. I wondered if Rich saw it too. In order to bring it into focus, I asked him to place the largest boulder at the left end, and he and I started building up the stones in pairs between which I was placing vertical stones that made me think of dragon and dinosaur spines, it didn’t take him long to see what I was up to.
Both of us thought the head boulder was a little too small though. This is where I got excited to create a proper face for our dragon out of clay. Right? Why not!
A clay rhubarb leaf I had out in the garden as decoration gave me an idea. I could see her face with one of those as her ruff, the fancy frilly parts that fan out behind the dragon’s head. To see how the rest of her was made, check out the YouTube video I made for the Facebook group “The Great Make.” In the end, I did another project for them live, but the video will be handy to share here.
And now finally, she’s made it out of the fire and onto the fire pit. We’re feeling pretty blessed to have our very own sleeping dragon to grace our gatherings around the fire.