The Woodstove

The Woodstove

At that writing workshop I took once several weeks ago that I’ll probably never stop talking about at this rate, I jotted down some thoughts on the cast iron woodstove that heated our childhood house. I showed it to my brother, Elia. He rebutted.

How did Elia and I turn out so differently? It amazes me. They should do a nature versus nurture study on us. Apparently the only thing we have in common is a fetish for taking cute pictures of our cats and forcing them on our friends.

Anyway, The Woodstove, from alternate perspectives:

A stove very similar to the one we grew up with and, in fact, refurbished and sold on the web site of my dad’s very good friend Richard Richardson: www.goodtimestove.com

The Woodstove, by Joslyn

The single heat source in our house was an old-fashioned cast iron woodstove. That thing was my childhood nemesis.

One of my first memories was of my dad roughhousing with me and accidentally pushing me into the hot iron while trying to tickle me to death. And my mother, subsequently, screaming at him.

Besides being of mortal danger to small children, the thing was utterly high maintenance in the way only 70s-era hippies could appreciate. Every fall, a truck would dump several cords of wood at the base of our driveway, which we would then have to chop, dry out, move in a wheelbarrow, and stack neatly under the porch. I blame my parents for the fact that I even had to learn a useless vocabulary word like “cord”.

In the winter, we would take turns making the chilly trek outside to bring in a load of wood. The stove constantly needed to be fed, because if you let it die out, starting it up again was beyond a drag. The loads of wood being dragged through the house made for a lot of dirt and wood chips everywhere.

And after all the work, the woodstove barely threw out enough heat. Which is why, in our giant house, we often stayed in that one central room and huddled around it to keep warm.

In the morning, I’d grab a pair of jeans off the clothesline on the back porch (my parents’ aversion to modern conveniences extended to their refusal to buy a clothes dryer) and drape them over the stove to thaw and dry while I showered. Then, I’d sneak back into the living room and get dressed, right there in front of the stove, hoping and praying that no one else would come downstairs.

I never learned how to start, stoke or manage the fire myself. Up through high school, if I was home alone (which was much of the time) I had to be given explicit step-by-step instructions on how and when to feed it wood in order to keep it going.

During my senior year, I almost burned the house down when I forgot to open the flue. The fire department came.

In my current house, the solitary heat source is a gas fireplace. Now this is a brilliant invention. With a flick of the wrist, I can simulate a real fire that warms up the entire place so fast that I often have to open a window to cool it back down. I have always been a big fan of the heat-up-high/windows-open tactic of controlling temperature.

It’s my way of rebelling.

The Woodstove, by Elia

I am better at stacking wood now than I ever was as a teenager. Now, I do it by choice. This past summer, when we received our six cords of hardwood, I began plotting the layout of the stack. This time around, I had a few things to consider:

1. A 2-cord stack makes an excellent noise barrier for the busy road we live on.
2. It also makes an excellent barrier for our scumbag neighbor who actually has set up a target on our property to shoot arrows at, without our permission.
3. Since I am cheap, and buy green wood, it needs the most sun to dry by winter.

So I settled on a 3-sided amphitheatre sort of setup. And yes, it is one of the best wood stacks in town. I cover it when it rains, and uncover it when sunny, with 100 feet of plastic.

But when I was younger, I saw no connection between the warmth I felt by the woodstove on a cold day with the need to do all this work in the fall. All I could ever think of while taking one of several thousand trips with the wheelbarrow full of wood was how freakin’ hot my room was going to be in winter, and how I would sleep with my window open in January because upstairs, my little cave with one sloped ceiling held the heat so well. I mean, it was consistently a hundred degrees. Our current bedroom is freezing by comparison, and I love it.

When the dump truck full of split wood would show up at our Ashfield house, generally my sister would have a boyfriend who would find it necessary to impress my mother by doing a bunch of the work.

(Disclaimer from Joslyn: I only had one boyfriend in highschool! Geez.)

But what the poor sap didn’t know is that my mother never really put much stock in yard work, so it was only me he was helping. Chores were something we didn’t do.

Yet, contrary to my upbringing, as an adult I have this incredible, almost instinctive need to clean up my property, and hers when I visit. Of course, my property has a picket fence now, and a barn, in true Vermont fashion, so proper appearance is mandatory. The wood stack must also be perfect.

As we slowly dismantle the stack and bring it inside to burn over the course of the winter, hours of exhaustion from overloaded schedules melt away by the hot metal box. Jake (our black cat) lives by the thing, as our cats did growing up, and one can catch that daily pungent smell of burnt hair—either human or feline—from someone getting too close. Roxanne and I lie on the rug in front of the stove (because we have no furniture) and either read, block our eyes from the overhead light, or fall asleep.

Just as I did when I was younger.

This past fall I was taking advantage of my teenage nephews-in-law and trying to get some wood stacking work out of them. They didn’t get it. They are from suburban Connecticut. And finally, when I asked them why they might think it necessary to put all this effort into it, they said: “To be better than the neighbors?”

And I spent the next hour explaining the finer points of heating one’s house with wood. After that, they understood, and might have even grasped a little of the romance. They are very bright, after all. Or maybe it is a little of the hippie in me, hanging on, thinking that everyone should be so connected to how they keep warm.