A Heated Childhood Memory

[mishalak]

A Pointless Story
I grew up in a time warp, similar to the way elisem describes her own childhood. Not that I went to a one-room schoolhouse. But I have some interesting experiences of childhood.

When I was growing up we heated our house with wood. Our house had been built when electricity was cheap so we had electric baseboard heaters. Now after our house was built electricity became a lot more expensive and we had to stop using the switch on the wall like "normal" Americans. My dad, being the Jeremiah Johnson type, decided that we has more than enough trees to heat our house.

So for the next decade the whole family spent summers helping my dad cut down pine trees and splitting them up into firewood. It was part of the chores to thin out our section of the forest. Then in the fall we would inevitably not have quite enough for the whole winter, so we would get in a load of wood, often very cheap, and spend a Saturday stacking it up all over the back deck.

My mom had to go to work in 1986 when Frontier airlines, the first one, went bankrupt. So thereafter I went to school with a key around my neck on a shoelace. When I got home with my sister we would crumple up some newspaper for kindling and put it and a few logs onto the coals. Hopefully there would be coals when we got home, otherwise it took more work to get the thing going. I got rather good at making the fire really hot. If it were dark we could see the metal glowing faintly.

There were many experiments conducted on that stove, like testing the flash point of wood and melting point of pennies. And I got rid of some embarrassing stuff there. I burnt some books with homosexual content in a fit of righteousness one day. I had bought them out of curiosity and ended up destroying them to make myself feel better. Young gay, repress thyself. Also I tried cooking various things on top of the stove. None of them worked out too well, especially not the chestnuts or acorns.

I don’t' regret growing up the way I did, but by gosh I'm a dyed in the wool city boy! I've lived the country life and I don't want to go back!

Comments

schoolhouse rock

[rvrjoe775.livejournal.com]

My family actually bought the one-room schoolhouse, added a wing with six bedrooms, converted two rooms in the basement into bedrooms, and installed a "fireplace" that was really a barrel on its side mounted on struts with some tin piping going out a hole in the wall. This was after running the country store, which was after the 40-acre farm of which we farmed perhaps an acre. Born and raised in Detroit, my folks will probably never live in a big city again, which I don't think I could ever stand a small town again.

Re: schoolhouse rock

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I think my mom would like to live in a larger town. Perhaps a suburb of Denver, but my dad is a dedicated country boy after being raised in Detroit (St. Claire Shores) and San Diego (La Mesa). My parents currently live on 20 acres of mixed ponderosa and dry meadows.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

Until I was 6 we didn't have either an indoor toilet or running water in the kitchen. There was a pump.

MKK--Definitely a city girl

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

My country life was not quite that rustic. I had the good fortune to just be the son of a wannabe rancher. So we had to keep the horses fed, weed the garden, but we also had a fair number of ammenities.