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I have grown up in the chilly northeastern part of the country. I have fond memories of building snow forts and having snowball fights with my sisters.
I also have some equally unfond memories of shoveling the long driveway and paths to the wood pile. As much as I loved growing up in an area that had a consistent potential to cancel school due to snow, I did not love the heating methods we utilized in trying to keep our house warm. Heating a house with a wood stove is a labor-intensive undertaking. There is no dial on the wall that you can simply turn so that your house heats up (or at least one we were allowed to use).
And in supplying the stove, the wood must be seasoned and split and stacked and then retrieved. As soon as you gathered a bundle, it seemed like another bundle was needed. Back then, we didn’t have a fancy woodshed, we stacked the wood and then covered it with a tarp. Removing the tarp and then the frozen pieces of wood was an errand that I loathed.
Starting the wood stove was always a tricky task as well. Sometimes it started right away, but sometimes, and especially if the wood was wet and hadn’t been properly recovered, starting it took a longggg time and often required searching for little dry pieces in the freezing cold. However, when the wood stove got going, the house was warm and cozy and filled with sounds of happy kids enjoying a favorite TV show or a family game. That is, until it was bedtime. As we lived in a two-story colonial with us four girls having bedrooms (and a bathroom to share) on the second floor, the warmth and heat of the wood stove would usually not rise to fill our sleeping spaces. Even though we had electric thermostats, heating the upstairs was expensive and we weren’t allowed to turn them on. And because I didn’t want to fetch wood in the middle of the night, we learned to sleep in the cold and rely on extra covers to keep us warm.
Fast forward nearly 40 years and I still like to sleep in the cold. However, as I get a little bit older, I have noticed that my tolerance for using the adjoining bathroom in the cold, is starting to wane. This is particularly true when I step out of the shower. As a result, I have started chanting to myself whilst drying off “You are NOT cold. You are NOT cold.”, repeating it over and over again until I am finally dressed and feeling warm. When my husband started complaining about the chilly bathroom, I shared with him my historical reasoning for keeping our sleeping quarters cool and my strategy for tricking myself into feeling warm. He looked at me in a rather perplexed way and asked me why, since we don’t heat with a wood stove, I don’t simply turn up the heat as he chanted “I AM cold! I AM cold!”.
Brrr! Brrr!
Kathy Naumann, possessor of NATURALLY curly hair and the understanding that you can’t control everything!
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