sketchbook stories: the woodstove
we didn't start the fire
Late October 1972, and snow had already set in. One of the coldest winters in decades. No furnace those first winter months, only woodstoves. My parents slept in shifts to stoke the fires. Woodsmoke clinging to the air, smothering our flannel with its cloying musk, my father joking he’d been an Eskimo1 in another life, when Eskimos were still called Eskimos and none of us knowing he’d be gone in three years, leaving for a different family on another frigid morning, leaving my mother and me to carry in all the wood, but split, though—he’d made sure of that.
I wasn't read for that gut punch at the end! And not to ruin the mood or anything, but thanks to your subtitle "we didn't start the fire" is going to be stuck in my head all day! 😂
A lot packed into that one paragraph. Your words deal with deep emotions, but simply on a practical level, I know how much work it is to heat with a wood stove as my aunt once did.