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By BILL THOMPSON
Sometimes just a picture of something will bring back memories that had faded long ago.
Such was the case last week when I saw a photograph in a catalogue of a wood-burning cook stove. What I didn’t remember was the price of $2,800! I think that price effectively removed the old-fashioned stove from the list of economical ways of cutting the cost of home cooking.
Combine that cost with the cost of having to buy the wood to fuel it and it consigns the stove to a permanent place in my memory but not my kitchen.
The memory was kindled when I saw my father piling another piece of wood on the already hot fire going in his fireplace one afternoon. While it was definitely warm in that room. it was the smell of the wood burning that sparked the memories.
I don’t remember exactly how old I was but I must have been very small when I helped my uncle carry wood into my grandmother’s kitchen. He was much bigger and carried a full armload of wood while I struggled to carry one piece.
I don’t even remember what time of day we carried the wood inside but I do remember the roar of the fire in the stove’s firebox when she cooked breakfast for us. Somehow the smell of the wood burning combined with the smell of eggs and sausage and grits created a culinary moment that has never been duplicated by any other kind of cooking appliance. The tastes of those items along with milk that just hours before had still been in the cow and real home-churned butter hovers in my mind after half a century.
There is another aroma that wafts through my memory of those mornings so long ago.
It’s the spicy smell of the kindling used to start the fire. “Lightwood” it’s called. I don’t know if the name refers to the fact that it is used to light (ignite) wood or that it isn’t heavy since it comes in small pieces. We pronounced it “lightard” and we got it from “lightard knots,” old pine stumps full of resin. Its use as kindling was the primary purpose for bringing it into the house but it was the smell that creates memory.
I’ve been known to collect pieces of lightard and leave it on the floor in the back of my car so I could enjoy the scent while traveling down the road. It sure beats those little pasteboard pine trees hanging from the rearview mirror.
As I watched my father stoke the fire in the fireplace, I recalled the old wood heaters, too. The cast iron ones cost more than the lightweight tin heaters we called “trash burners.” Inadvertently touching one of those old heaters is how I learned one of my first words: “hot.”
Wood fires are now almost always used just for atmosphere. The experts say that fireplaces are the least efficient way to heat a room. Some of us have “inserts” in our fireplace to increase the efficiency but it’s still not the real reason we use firewood. There is something comforting, something that promotes contemplation about a fire in the fireplace.
I remember going outside to get cold just so I could come in and get warm by the wood fire.
Shiny electric stoves have taken the place of the wood burning kind but I just can’t conjure up the same feeling sitting in a kitchen with a modern stove that I got doing my homework in the warmth of a kitchen warmed by the wood stove and wrapped in the lingering smell of supper mixed with the smoky aroma of pine and oak wood and the company of three or four “biddies” (small chicks) resting in a pasteboard box in the corner.
I can’t afford it but it would be worth $2,800 to recreate those moments.