Stories I tell my grandchildren, part I
I love telling my grandsons about the snow in my hometown when I was growing up. Looking back it seems magical. The snow, and the room by the stove.
The snow was deeper than anywhere I have ever been since or at least that is how I remember it. My memories are probably better than reality and no doubt exaggerated I have romanticized winters in my hometown - winters that currently do not exist for me here in Utah or even back in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where I grew up. Those winters were long and cold, but always cozy because I was safe in that old house, in the room by the stove. Safe with my parents, my older sister and younger brother and sometimes baby chickens and a dog and a cat. Sometimes several cats.
"I walked to school in the snow, sometimes it was 40 below zero and my nose and mouth had to be covered", I tell my grandkids. "When I breathed in the cold air, my nostrils stuck together. Then I add for effect "It was uphill both ways. My mother gave me a hot baked potato to put in my mittens to keep my hands warm and then I ate the potato for lunch". The last part isn't true. I came home for lunch - usually Campbell's tomato soup and a grilled cheese.
In reality, it was really cold, but the distance probably was less than half a mile. "We wore boots that fit over our shoes and bunny bread bags over our shoes in case our boots leaked," I tell them even though I can only imagine what they think "Bunny Bread" is. I had bright orange boots "so the snow plow would see" me my mom explained. I remember those boots with a button hook on the side, made to wear over shoes. I loved their bright color. Alice Frisk, one of our neighbors, always told my mom she knew it was me by those boots. Ever since those orange boots I have felt compassion for and a need to rescue on sale shoes that are a color that no one else wants I feel sorry for unpurchased ugly shoes just like I do for Christmas trees not chosen, left alone in tree lots the day after Christmas, waiting for the chipper.
I remember my house, sideway leaning then and now, today still standing proudly but threatening to give up the ghost after being abandoned by its occupants so long ago. The house always seemed old and wise. It was never painted or maybe it had been at one time long before my dad, much to my mom's anger, bought it around the time I was born, for $500. On the outside, it always looked like a pair of stonewashed jeans - comfortable and sturdy and once in style. On the inside, it was warm and it was home although not as fancy as some of my friends houses were. I bet it was way more lived in and loved in though. I imagined that those friends had real locks on the door and not a kitchen knife stuck between the door and the door frame. That knife made me feel like I was in a fortress as I stared at it from my place on the couch snuggled next to my mom.
The house was heated by two wood stoves, one in the kitchen and a main one in "The room by the stove". We called it "the room by the stove" because the stove was the most prominent thing in the otherwise anemic room. The room only existed to be home to that stove. Then it wasn't a bedroom or a living room. It was the room by the stove. I don't remember what was in it other than my mom's ironing board. An old transistor radio played the Rudy Saari show and later the Jan Tucker show, which we listened to anxiously to see if school would be cancelled on stormy winter days. The ironing board held our breakfast plates of toast on homemade bread and hot chocolate. We ate our breakfast standing up with our butts to the stove, getting itchy from its warmth. A big window looked out on the world and the snow and my dad's old pickup truck.
I can still hear the sound of my dad crumbling up old Ontonagon Heralds and Milwaukee Sentinels or Journals, opening the heavy door of the stove and placing the crumbled newspaper in followed by a pile of kindling. The door groaned and creaked, protesting when my dad opened it, like my knees and I do now when I first stand up in the morning. When the kindling was burning just enough, he put in a bigger, studier piece of wood, which sizzled because it had been taken from the snowy part of the woodpile, that part not covered by a the tarp that protected most of the pile from the crusty snow. He poked it with the poker until it crackled and became hot. My sister called it "now wood" because it got hot quick but burned long enough to warm the house and allow for a more slower burning piece of wood to be added later.
That room became a laundry room of sorts where a wooden rack was placed around the stove and our wet clothes hung on it - a substitute dryer when my mom could not hang clothes on the clotheslines buried under the snow. The stove also dried our wet mittens and caps. I can still smell the burnt aroma from the sizzling wet wool.
The room by the stove served as our sickroom where my sister and I, both recovering from whooping cough, stayed under a steam tent made with our old vaporizer and a sheet thrown over that same rack that dried our clothes in the winter.
"I laid at the foot of my bed at night, reading, because the light was better and I could put my feet on the warm chimney that came up from the stove, on the top side of my bed, I say. "The bricks were bare and warm but in the morning when I got up for school, the floors were cold and I could see my breath".
I tell my grandsons stories about that old house and these winters. I tell them how cozy the room by the stove was in the winter and how the snow covered its big window on the outside making it dark and like a cozy cave. The snow covered the window mostly because my dad shoveled and piled it high against the house as our only insulation. The blizzards we often got shook the house with snow and wind, but the house never let us down and protected us. Windows not covered with snow usually were decorated with frost on the outside and plastic, which served as another form of insulation, on the inside.
One of the things my sister and I liked to do involved jumping out of the upstairs window. After making sure my mom knew we were inside, we snuck our jackets and boots from the hallway and went upstairs, opened the bedroom window above the room by the stove and jumped out. It felt so daring to jump out that upstairs bedroom window and for a second, have a sensation of flying. Landing in the soft snow, our legs sunk down and we had to dig them out before rolling down the snowbank in front of the window of the room by the stove. Sometimes when we pulled our feet out of the boots the boots stayed in the snow and we spent time digging them out.
We walked around to the front door and knocked, surprising my mom who thought we were upstairs. "You girls are gonna break a leg jumping out of that window" or "what if you sink all the way down and can't get out? Despite her warnings we continued to do this until the snow started melting and getting crusty.
My grandson drew this picture of me Jumping out the window.
Winter came early and stayed late, always wearing out it's welcome. Winter winds shook that old house but it withstood everything given to it and it stands there, sad and empty without us. It holds our memories though. Both stoves are gone now sold by my brother for scrap metal. The house still leans to one side, like an old person with osteoporosis or someone in need of a hip replacement. That old house taught me that a home isn't defined by it's fancy furniture or sparkling new appliances but more by the people in it and the memories those people make.
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