Quarter after seven on the first decently cold morning of this freakishly warm month. Uncle Joel wants a YUUUGE fire in the woodstove while he drinks his coffee. Except there’s a problem…
Dammit, Little Bear!
A week or two of barely-cool mornings, where there’s a brief fire or no fire at all, can cause one to forget useful habits like “make sure the woodbox is full before you settle down with that book.” Then you get to pay for your sloth with shivery trips to the woodshed in the morning half-light.
Also I find I kind of miss Seymour – as long as the windows are closed.
Well I guess it could have been worse, you could have had to go out and find a tree to chop down then cut it up for the wood… But still heading out on a cold morning to fetch wood, even if it’s close by, is a pain in the rump.
Whenever I want to bitch about cold mornings, I think about my late father (1945-2013). He was a sharecropper (and bootlegger)’s kid in East Texas; they had a coal-burning stove, & as the oldest, it was his job to fire up the stove first thing upon rising, before heading out to his job milking cows (and that’s a damned early-rising job!) before going to school.
When I had a wood stove, I begrudged the time it took for the bigger stuff to catch off the kindling. I have no idea how long it takes coal to catch, but I bet it’s a helluva lot longer than I’d want.
He & the family picked cotton, too. He had dreams of being a lawyer, but quit school at 17, after his parents divorced, for the Army, then became a Screaming Eagle ’cause the jump pay meant more money he could send home to support everybody (& he was afraid of heights).
I’m pretty certain that somehow or other he avoided feeling guilty about all his white privilege.
A lot of this has nothing to do with the post, but once I started, it just ran. Sorry about that, a little bit, but not too much. My Dad was a better man than I’ll ever be, & I thought I’d tell a bit more about him. Sometimes I miss the tough, gruff, tender-hearted old fucker.
Tennessee Budd – I hear what your sayin’. I too won’t likely ever live up to my Dad either, God rest his soul, but I sure miss him sometimes.
Tennessee Budd, I’m pretty sure that at a certain age all guys start actively measuring how we stack up against our fathers and the other adults we thought were so clueless when we were young and knew everything.