SWEET TEA: Give me real heat or nothing

LITTLE ROCK — In the matter of heating a house, you can’t beat real fire, by which I mean real logs burning in a real fireplace.

I pronounce that as a man who has never actually lived that way - splitting logs in July, hauling logs inside at 5 a.m. in January, pulling three-inch slivers of pine from the palm of my hand.

I’ve lived with a couple of fine fireplaces, though, the first of which was in our little townhouse in Colorado, built of fake stone (house and fireplace), but the fire was real.

The fireplace in our Mobile house was a barnburner - real rocks stacked all the way to the 10-foot ceiling, paneled with real fake-wood paneling.

I have had just enough fireplaces in my life to develop a sense of superiority about abominations like fake fireplaces with fake ceramic logs.

My comedown came in Arkansas: A house great in every way except ... the fake logs were made, apparently, of cardboard dipped in asbestos.

Two-hundred bucks, nearly, I spent on a set of ventless gas logs, which stunk us out of the house.

So I took them outside, where I connected them to the gas-grill pipe, which I’ve never used for a gas grill. (Give me charcoal or steamed vegetables. If I’m going to burn up meat, I want to ruin it with real fire.) Twelve hours of nonstop burning, still the logs stank.

Six years passed until I decided we needed a space heater like the one in my grandparents’ house in El Paso. The one across the Rio Grande from Juarez.

Before daylight on cold mornings, Papadee would tiptoe his way across sleeping grandkids spread out on the floor to put a match to his space heater.

So I searched the galaxies for a space heater like the one Mamadee and Papadee installed when they built the house in 1930. I called antique stores. I traversed the Internet.

Then the realization hit like the blue flame that swooshes across the gas jets on a space heater.

My grandparents’ space heater, the 80-year-old one from El Paso, was in my memorabilia room with all my other, uh, memorabilia. I had hauled it from El Paso to Mobile to Oklahoma City to Myrtle Beach to Maumelle, using it as decoration, never once thinking that I might actually use it.

So I dismantled it, cleaned it, set it out front of the fake fireplace, hooked it up, and now I have my space heater, complete with memories.

In the matter of real fire, a space heater, I realize, is just as artificial as ceramic logs. The difference is that a space heater doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is, and a space heater does its job without raising a big stink.