Stove Black And Life's Lessons

It's hotter than blazes out there......and having grown up in a house heated by a wood stove, I know how hot blazes can be!! My car's thermometer was showing 100 when we went to walk (inside!) about an hour ago. Ugh. It's September, so I'm sure the end is in sight. Maybe just not quickly enough.

Today's wood stoves tend to be nicely styled, they are aesthetically pleasing when added to your décor. Not so much when I was growing up. Ours was an upright cylindrical contraption. Mom's teakettle fit nicely on top of it. The stovepipe angled up and fit into the chimney, and the ashes were removed from the bottom of the stove.

We had a lot of timber on our farm, so fuel was in ample supply. During the summer Dad would scout the timber as he did his summer work on the farm, checking out downed trees or limbs that could be made into firewood and watching for trees that needed to be cut down. In the fall, he would head out on the tractor, with the wagon behind, and start cutting wood for the winter. He would haul it back to the barn lot, in front of the house, and cut it to stove length there. We would always have quite a pile by the time cold weather hit.

Part of the daily chores was to carry armloads of wood from that pile in the barn lot to the front porch and stack it there to be used in the stove. Dad always carefully banked the fire at night, then got up before the rest of us to get the fire going and the house heated up.

I can't begin to imagine the hours it took Dad to do all that work. I do know when he started cutting in the fall, the weather was still pretty warm. I know that Mom and I helped out with stacking the wood in the barn lot, and we also pitched in with carrying it up to the porch daily.

Living on the farm was often hard work. But there were times of fun, too. For instance, when Dad cut those trees in the timber, he would pile up all the small limbs and brush. At some point in the fall, we would load up in the wagon and Dad would drive us back to that brush pile with the tractor. The brush pile would be burned, and we would have a wonderful wiener roast. I always enjoyed that and wished it could happen more often.

That wood stove was also the source of one of many life's lessons for me. When I was young, Mom would sometimes need to help Dad with the chores in the barn. If the weather was too nasty, they would occasionally leave me in the house. One day I was coloring while they were doing chores, and I had a brilliant idea. The wood stove was a dull, fairly ugly, black. I had all these bright crayons. So I proceeded to color the stove. It worked so well, the wax crayons melting against the surface of the black stove. I just knew Mom and Dad would be happy with the stove's new look.

I was wrong. They were not happy. And even though I was young, the very next time it was warm enough to let the fire go out and the stove cool down, I found out how to black a stove. That, by the way, is NOT a fun job. I'm sure in the meantime, the melted wax odor permeated the kitchen. I'm lucky I didn't burn myself.

Having a Mom who had been a teacher was not always fun. She had way too many ideas about how to modify my behavior. I'm guessing I was the only student in my class at school who knew how to black a stove. So many life's lessons to be learned.......like how she decided I should learn better the night I helped with chores and decided to splat in every fresh cow patty I found between the house and the barn......but that's a story for another day!