I have a fireplace in my living room. It has gas logs. I have not lit it in years. I cannot imagine why I should bother. I am sure that it would make the entire house hot and melt the scatterings of rime from all the window panes. I am sure that, if I had a large, rusty-blond-colored dog named Bowbow, he would curl up in front of it and proceed to lick himself. I am sure that, if any overdue notices from the IRS were dropped into that fireplace, they would shrivel into ashes and dance lightly up the flue. I am sure that, if I touched the lighted gas logs, they would burn me. I do not, however, think that they would keep me warm.

I am supposed to be comforted by the presence of such a fireplace. I am supposed to delight in the fact that there is nothing about it to smell or crackle or send cinders hopping out onto the rug. I am supposed to be relieved that, because I have gas logs, I do not have to keep a pile of rotting firewood on my balcony next to the black metal patio furniture. I am expected to revel in the calm assurance that comes from living in a world that is free from the colonies of centipedes and beetles and doodle bugs and brown recluse spiders that spring up, self-generating, in such piles of rancid, moist firewood.

But I do not fall easily for that sort of trick. I know full well that a fire piped into my house by the gas company would not really be a fire at all. It would have flames that would lick upward, perfect in their mix of yellow and electric blue and red, and its little curdles of asbestos would glow underneath the concrete logs, just as if they were live coals, ready to burn themselves out in order to keep a baby warm or to bring feeling back into the half-frozen fingers of a weak-blooded invalid.

But I am not so easily duped by mere appearances. I know that such a rack full of heated-up logs is not really a fireplace, any more than a Lean Cuisine is really a dinner or a white wine spritzer is really a drink. It is not a hearth around which children would gather, waiting for the arrival of Christmas. It is not a place where one could grow old, sitting in a wing chair and reading Carlyle. It is not a place where one could sip a little cognac and proceed to make long, slow, gentle firewood-scented love.

Perhaps, because I am Southern by birth, I only dream that this sort of fireplace exists at all. I can only remember vaguely the fireplace that burned, for perhaps three weeks every winter, in the living room of my grandparents’ house. The wood they burned was damp and unseasoned, filling the house with the medicinal smell of cedar and pine, and yet I can remember wet, rain-rotten Alabama mornings when my brother and I would rush, barefooted, in our flannel pajamas to stand in front of the fireplace, dancing back and forth on the hearth tiles, trying to make the feeling come back to our toes. I can remember my grandfather crouching down in front of the ashes, searching for a coal that would light his first cheap cigar of the day. I can remember my grandmother, in her flour-sack apron and her black woolen sweater, her white hair stuffed up into a net, standing with her back to the fireplace, demurely raising her skirts to warm her rickety, bird-like legs.

It was in front of the fireplace that my brother and I were bundled up, the winter we both had the mumps and the chicken pox. It was there that my damp underwear were spread out to dry the last time I wet the bed. It was there that we waited, watching the fire logs bend and fall apart, the winter that my grandmother died.

My parents moved into this house and boarded up the fireplace. My mother said it only made a mess. My father, who sold cars in Montgomery, said he did not have the time to go out chopping down trees and sawing up logs for firewood. In the summer, because the fireplace was never used, filthy, ash-blackened baby sweeps would fall from their nests in the chimney and fly out into the living room, blindly flinging themselves against the windows, terrifying the maid, and leaving black smudges on my mother’s gold brocade drapes. Even after the fireplace was boarded up, they could be heard chirping sadly behind the wood panel. Sometimes, my mother said, she thought the sound of them might drive her insane.

But my mother now had a coal-oil-burning heater in the hall outside the bathroom. It rumbled as it heated itself up in the mornings. It made low groaning noises at night. It was there that my brother and I dressed on December and January mornings, slipping quickly into freshly washed blue jeans that had hung in front of the heater all night, the metal zippers and the brass buttons so hot that they stung our bare skin. But it was not a place where anyone wanted to linger. Through a tiny, screen-covered grate, my brother and I could see the flame burning, but we stayed away from it, lest it explode and singe every hair from our heads.

And yet we were told to be grateful that we lived in a house that had such a heater, that our house was better than the shacks where unsteady chimneys sent smoke limply trailing up into the air. We were told that we were lucky that our clothes did not smell like the clothes of the Lapsley children, who stank of burning wood and bacon grease because their father drank whiskey and because their school lunches were paid for by the state.

We were told, in short, the same sort of thing that I was told by the real estate agent who sold me my condominium. I was promised that, with my rack full of gas-burning logs, I could enjoy the beauty of an old-fashioned fireplace, and yet, because of my energy-efficient heating system, I would be toasty-warm and climate-controlled at all times. I would not have to crank up my gas logs, I was told, unless I was having a holiday party or unless, perhaps, I wanted to establish a particularly romantic atmosphere. I would not have to worry about doodle bugs making nests in my rugs. I was told that my fireplace came with a packet of scented wood chips. Just a couple of them, tossed in among the gas logs, could fill my one-bedroom condominium with the authentic odor of a raging forest fire.

I have lived in my condominium 10 years now, and I have only used my imitation fireplace two times. The second time, I discovered that the damper sticks. I have never paid the $60 it would cost to have it fixed. I cannot imagine a more useless way to spend money. Sitting alone in my living room, the air clean and the heat pump gently murmuring along in the background, I cannot imagine what I would gain by staring into a make-believe fireplace. I cannot think that it is the sort of moment that would make two people want to hold hands. What’s more, I have already tried the scented wood chips. They did not work. They made my living room smell like a bottle of Pine-Sol. It did not smell like the Lapsley children at all.