COLD MORNINGS/BUILD FIRE:POST #42

I loved sleeping in a big, deep, feather bed. If we didn't have that we had a pile of wonderful quilts piled on us and we slept as warm as if we had central heat. Especially if there were three of us in the bed!

I mentioned in an earlier post how awful it was to be sound asleep and a storm would come up and Mom would start yelling and we all made our way to the storm house. How miserable! But, there was another time that was maybe even more miserable than that. We would all be sound asleep and the house was cold and suddenly there came this booming voice, "Teddy, get up an build a fire." You talk about miserable! I would crawl out of that bed in my drawers, trample through Mom and Dad's bedrom and into the living room where the king heater was. I'd then grab a few sticks of kindling or if there was no kindling get some pages out of the Sears-Roebuck catalog that wasn't in use at the outhouse yet, add a few sticks of wood and set them on fire. If they caught I could then go back to bed. The miserable of all miserables was that the fire would go out and you would hear that booming voice again, "Boy, your fire went out" and I had to do it all over again. I just hated having to start the fire in the moring. After while the whole bunch would get out of thier warm beds and come in to a toasty warm fire to get dressed for the day and turn around and warm thier rear ends good before eating breakfast.

This is why it was important in the late afternoon when doing the chores to get some kindling in and a few sticks of firewood. If you forgot to do that and you were chosen the next morning to build the fire, it was out to the wood pile to fumble around in the dark trying to find something for kindling and a slab or two of wood, and that was plain inhumane treatment! Where was the ACLU then?

I have spent considerable time helping to cut wood so we would have a warm house in the winter time. Sometimes we would walk up and down the railraod tracks and find a few chunks of coal that had fallen off the train and that coal would make a super fire. Since Dad worked on the railroad we often got the old railroad ties and hauled them home and sawed them up and they too made a super fire. They were all soaked with creosote and caught pretty quick and that king heater would just turn red with heat and sometimes Mom would get a bit scared that the fire was so hot. Later Dad started going up to Bradshaw's sawmill and buying slabs of lumber and that would catch quickly because it was dry and it made a good fire too.

Old Booie would come down to the house sometimes at night and we would just sit around the stove and talk. Booie dipped snuff and he would spit in the stove until he put the fire out and then he would go home and we would go to bed. I have listened to some mighty interesting and educational conversations around that king heater in the evenings at the big house.

But, here is the sad part. After a few hours of good sleep we had to go through all that ordeal again: "Rayburn, get up and build a fire." Boy, was I ever glad to hear him say any name other than Teddy. You know, the odd thing is this: Until the day that he died my Dad argued that he never made one of us get up and build a fire because he did it every morning! If he did, which I know he didn't, then I sure had some miserable dreams. I think that I am going to take a little kindling and a couple of slabs of wood with me and when I meet him in the great by and by, I am going to say, "Get up, Herb and build the fire!"