Dial Up Some Comfort

    Do you have random thoughts about everyday things, that just hit you? You know… simple things, things you use and don’t take time to appreciate most of the time.

        We were farm kids on the North Dakota prairie, in an old two story, uninsulated farm house, with a big old coal furnace contraption in the basement.  Only one big metal grate in the middle of the living room floor, heated the whole two story house. That was the only heat we had in the winter.  The furnace itself was directly below the big 36”or so, grate in the center of the living room.  We opened and shut the damper, with a metal chain on the wall. That chain allowed us to get more or less heat, and if you valued your life, kids kept their hands off it! Dad would haul a couple loads of coal into the basement in the fall. Backing the truck up to the basement window, he removed the window with about ten coats of red paint on the frame.  Then he'd use the hoist on the truck to tumble the coal in the window opening.  It would thunderously empty into the window hole, into the basement. There was always some he’d have to throw in by hand and move it around in the basement to a handy spot to load or “fix the furnace”. Then they would have to keep the coal stove going all the time. It was front and foremost all day and night, every day and night. 

       The upstairs door, we called it, blocked of the second story where our bedrooms were. That door was kept shut all the time. They only opened it in the evening before bedtime so as not to lose any heat upstairs when no one was up there. A few hours before bed though, they would open the door so the heat would drift up there. It NEVER felt like any did though…we would sleep under five or six big blankets and nothing was worse that that first plunge into bed at night. Freezing cold, until you got a little nest warmed up from your body.

 

Just how cold it was is hard to explain to anybody who hasn't experienced it, or even comprehend myself anymore really, when I have been blessed with fifty years of comfort. Those days are wayyyyy in the rear view mirror! When they put houses together there are of course nail heads every so far.  Back then, (because that was before they sheet rocked and used mud over the nails), I'm not kidding when I say there was frost on all those nail heads inside our room and heavy frost, like 1/2 inch thick,  on the inside of our windows. If you talked you could see your breath! When Mom got us up in the morning, Dad had already made the cold trip downstairs and had the furnace blazing with a new coal chunk and the damper was wide open... meaning we were getting all the heat we could. Mom would hand us our clothes and we’d dress on the furnace grate. The middle round section was hot, most of the time too hot, to stand on! But the outside corners were as cold as the middle was hot, so we dressed on the cold part but kept our body parts close to the middle, turning from front to back like a burger trying to get both sides cooked ha! After we got dressed we would usually have hot cereal of something hardy for breakfast before the bus picked us up. School was seventeen miles away, but that doesn’t count all the pickups along the way to school. It took an hour and a half to get to school. 

When I was ten or so Mom and Dad got a little “oil burner” stove they put in the kitchen. That was so nice to warm our hands and feet on because the bottom actually had a blower on the bottom and was nice. Plus we could keep a tea kettle with hot water on the top of it all the time for tea or whatever we needed hot water for. 

After Dad passed away in the late sixties, Mom decided to “spruce up” the house a little bit, and the hauling of the coal was overwhelming for her. She had the old coal furnace torn out and hauled away, and a new propane furnace one with a big silver pig on the lawn to supply the gas. No more with coal dumping, now that it was just Mom, Kathy and I on the farm. That meant the big grate came out of the center of the living room floor and heat registers were put in all over the house ( still not upstairs though, we still just opened the door and let some heat up and it was still COLD). We had a nice gold thermostat on the wall now, carpet on the floor and wood paneling on the walls. We were moving up in the world as far as comfort, that was for sure! I remember loving to lay on the living room carpet with a blanket over the register. Heat filled up the blanket! What a great way to watch TV even though Mom always complained I was "hogging all the heat"! 

Today Easton had a running meet after school that was canceled due to a cold, windy day, complete with blowing dust. I did laundry and dishes and some other work but decided at 4:30 i was going to call it a day. I’ve been watching a show called New Amsterdam and I like it so much, that even though it’s extremely filled with one sided social messages that I usually bail out on… the show is so good I’ve kept on watching. I love it! As I got my drink, my phone, and settled in to watch tv… I snapped on my electric throw, one of my favorite things in the universe. I have always been extremely stiff and arthritic, so I have a couple electric shoulder throws and a nice big sheepskin throw I use every day. Most days I snap them on and think…"I love this thing” and it ends there. But today, my mind traveled to all the years when I was young and we could have only dreamed of such a luxury…a HEATED blanket!  Or an indoor toilet too, but i won't go there. What a wonderful invention!  Gratitude people, for simple every day things! Appreciate the small things because without them, they become huge things.