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Our Old Wood Stove and Other Memories |
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It was a large house with three floors and a walk-in basement. Actually, the basement was above ground and the house was on cement supports tall enough that one could stand, except toward the back of the basement which was toward the front of the house where the gentle slope of the land lent room only for crawling -- as would be expected for a crawl space under a house as was typical for this local and era. Amongst other things, our crawl space (or basement) housed a workshop and lots of wood pieces, tools, and odds and ends for patching up the house -- and a water heater. Now, the water heater was a thing unto itself. It was the kind of apparatus that, in those days (and perhaps today as well) was called a demand heater. That is, whenever someone turned on a hot water tap, a gas fire came on in the water heater (which, as I said above, was in the basement) under a long coil of ¼ inch copper tubing through which the water flowed and, in so doing, absorbed the heat of the fire. The reason I remember the water heater so vividly was that my father (Dad) would have to take out the coil of copper tubing every month or so, set it onto a cradle on the work bench, put a drip pan under it, and then divest it of its accumulated calcium by pouring muriatic acid into a funnel taped onto the top of the coil of tubing. This was necessary since the calcium stoppered up the copper tubing which effect then prevented the passage of water and retarded the transfer of heat from the fire into the water flowing through its veins. It was not a particularly hard process but it did take an inordinate amount of time since the inside of the tubing was small and the dissolution process was very slow. Moreover, the gas formed by the reaction between the calcium and acid would bubble up through the small tubing and erupt over the top of the funnel if Dad attempted to accelerate the process by adding more acid before the previous dose had exhausted its powers. If Dad started in the morning, he could get the whole contraption back into operation before supper. But, to continue: Our house was divided mostly into apartments. There was, as well, a quadraplex of apartments in the back yard as well as an apartment over the double garage, also in the back yard. We (Dad, Mom, and me) lived in the main house, Sis and her husband (George) lived in one of the quadraplex apartments, and my brother (Warren) had already departed to pursue his career in the outside world. Our house was on a corner of two rather main streets and cattycorner across the street from the elementary school that I frequented five days of each week. Our house was six blocks away from the local movie theater and considerably farther from the closer of the two high schools in town. Most of the time I walked to the movie house on Saturday afternoons and took a bus to the high school on weekdays. This apartment house scenario was not a particularly unusual one for this era since money was not in plentiful supply and many people, including Dad and Mom, helped eke out a living by converting parts of their homes into apartments. Anyway, as I remember, we had some thirteen apartments on the lot, all of which were maintained by Dad, Mom, Sis and George. And what did I do? Probably not much as I was much younger than they and not much good at such things. Nonetheless, I did learn to do carpentry, to paper walls, paint houses, fix roofs, fix water heaters and faucets, and unstop toilets -- all of which I still do to this day, but only on a more limited basis and only for my own welfare. We lived on the first floor and what I remember most vividly was the wood stove in the living room -- the real living room next to the kitchen where Mom cooked, and the room in which we ate, dressed on cold mornings, and lived. We had a living room as well but one did not live in living rooms in those days since these were solely for entertaining friends and guests. Our living room for guests had a beautiful big oak fireplace mantle and a big oak stair that went all the way up to the third floor and which was one of the ways one accessed the apartments on the upper levels. But all this is another story. Our wood stove, which is the main subject of this discourse, was of the horizontal variety meaning that it was a rectangular device that lay on its side and was supported by four legs about eight inches long. The top of the stove had two round holes covered with cast iron lids where one would put pots for cooking if one was going to cook on this kind of stove. There was, of course, a door on one end where wood was introduced and a vent and stovepipe on the other end for the egress of smoke. Since this was not the stove upon which Mom cooked, there was ample room on top of the stove for warming feet and hands, and drying shoes or whatever else of this genre that needed its services. There were, also, some chairs backed up to the stove and a rack for hanging wet clothes. Anyway,
for some reason, our bedrooms were not heated and these were cold on winter
nights even in Texas. So every
morning during cold spells, Mom would put bricks on top of the wood stove in our
"real living room" so that by nightfall they would have absorbed so
much heat that they could be handled only with gloves.
Then, just before we hopped into bed, Mom would wrap each brick in old
newspaper and put one brick under the sheets and down near the foot of each bed.
I will never forget the comfort that brought -- just pure heaven. And, so it went. The family is gone and I have grown old with only a few memories of what was probably an active childhood. The old house is still there although the big palm in the front yard is gone, the big front porch has been changed, and time has left it a mere shell of the house that I once knew. Yet, many memories must be there still, well hidden deep within its bones. If what is left of our old house could talk, it would surely tell me many things that now have passed the portals of time. Memories like those of our wood stove -- and others that, perhaps, might best be left to time. Perhaps it best for our old house to keep within its walls those stories of lives now past -- and let me keep only those that bring me joy.
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