Brother Fire

“All praise be yours, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
Through whom you brighten up the night.
How beautiful is he, how gay! Full of power and strength.”

St. Francis of Assissi

The traffic goes by this building in an endless stream. Each day it grows, more rapid and more relentless, streaking by with roars and screeches and foul smells. So I remember with longing our little white farmhouse, sitting at a slant beside the quiet, empty dirt road. The sun warmed the house and the dirt of the road, which was seldom disturbed. It was a long time ago, but now I am allowing myself to return in memory where it was peaceful and we were surrounded with meadows, trees, water, and the good earth. It was all there in that homestead. Everything we needed. Earth, Air, Fire and Water.

Today I will talk about Brother Fire. We hadn’t read anything about woodstoves in our farm books. But we had prepared ourselves by buying an antique, cast-iron, potbellied stove. It was the kind of stove one sees in picture books for children. It was quite simply beautiful.

When we moved to the farm, it had two woodstoves. One was a pretty-shaped, square steel stove in the parlor; but this stove was not airtight. Dave knew this was dangerous, and that we had to replace it as soon as we could.

The stove in the kitchen was a white Enterprise, very common in farmhouses throughout Nova Scotia, and a very fine and practical stove it was. It had a water reservoir on the side, and a warming oven at the top. But still, we replaced it with our cast-iron stove because we loved the old-timey looks of ours, and also, we thought it would hold and radiate more heat than the white enamel stove. We were right about this. We had done well to choose it and to bring it with us to the unknown. We put the white Enterprise stove in the workshop, I believe. I know we kept it, because when we left, we put it back and took our cast-iron stove with us.

I can see our farm so clearly in my mind. I can smell the woodsmoke coming from the chimney. I can still feel the warmth of the heat from those stoves. I remember our gradual learning about wood and about stoves. Before we replaced the woodstove in the parlor, it ran away with us once. Dave was away. It was only the boys and me who were there when it started to get hotter. It got hotter and hotter, and suddenly it was as if it glowed red. Inside was a fiery furnace.

We shut down the damper, but since it was not airtight, that did not stop oxygen from getting to the fire. We were all panicked. We were yelling and running around, not knowing whether to throw water on the fire or not. We were afraid that if we did that, it would break the stove! Finally we realized what we could do. We put out the fire with a pair of wet jeans, or maybe two, thrown onto the logs. That worked! It put out the fire, but not with as much shock to the stove as a pail of water would have been. This was a good solution, because we needed that stove until we got a new one!

I think I remember that we ran outside to look at the chimney, and sparks were flying into the night sky. But our farm angel was watching over us, and nothing caught on fire, not the roof, nor the wall in back of the stove, nor the carpet in the little front room.

I will never forget that carpet. Some might have said it was ugly; but to me, it was beautiful. It had a rich brown background, covered with bright crimson, rust and orange leaves. It was an autumn rug, and it seemed so perfect for that little room.We had a metal pad under the stove which protected the rug from most of the sparks.

After the runaway stove, we bought a new stove as soon as we could. We bought a jurtle! We loved it. It was cast iron too, and it had a freize carved on the side – a scene of a farmer with his animals and his forest, and a hawk flying overhead. It was beautiful, and it was airtight. However, it did have one drawback; it had been designed to use with long, narrow logs, like those from small trees. We had to chop up great big logs, and it was difficult to split enough small logs to keep it filled. However, we managed. This was a case of learning the hard way. If we had stayed on the farm, we would have eventually sold our jurtle and probably bought a stove made by Rocky Irons!

However, we used the jurtle and it was okay. It kept our living room (parlor), warm and toasty. I can still see us in the evening, all sitting around the stove, reading. I remember Randy especially, reading in the white, naugahyde wing backed chair we had bought from Andover. We also had a small couch and a matching chair, upholstered in good sturdy corduroy. The chair was dull gold, and the couch was olive green, both of which seemed to have been bought with our bright, crimson-leaved carpet in mind.

We had bought a farm of 147 acres. About 35 of those acres were cleared, and the rest was wooded. That is, except for the 10 or so acres that had been dug up to be a gravel pit. We joined the Woodlot Owners Asssociation and after a while, they planted our former gravel pit in red spruce trees.

So we had a large woodlot. And that was a wonderful thing, because we would always have our own wood for heat. The heat from the stoves was a warm, radiating heat unlike anything we had known before. In Andover, our house had been heated by a hot air furnace, and everyone knows how uneven and chilly that can be. I remember standing on the register to get warm.

Now, though, we stood in front of the wood stove. I don’t think there is anything so cozy as a good wood stove. We could hang our wet hats and mitts around it, and our socks as well. The smell of the burning wood is part of the memory of our life in that little frame house. We had no other problem with fire out of control. It was, instead, for us a cheery and bright presence, bringing warmth into our home and our lives.

Except for Jeff, I believe the boys were happy on the farm. They had real projects to work on and real work that meant something to our family. They had the companionship of the animals – all of them. And they loved working in the woods. They would all trudge off, with Lady so happy beside them, heading for a few hours in the autumn sunshine, cutting wood and loading it into the pickup truck. It was a good life.

A lot of the time I would stay home while they went outdoors. There was work to do in the house and the fire to keep going. I got so that it became automatic for me to put another log on every so often. It was such a constant thing that I can still feel myself throwing the log in so that it would go to the back of the firebox, and then another, and another, knowing just when to stop and how to lay it so the fire wouldn’t go out.

It was like milking; a chore that had to be done on a regular basis, so that it became part of the automatic routine of life, and comforting to do, yet restricting, too. Someone always had to be there to milk the cow and to keep the fire going. Well, we were able to go away for about five or six hours at a time before the fire went out. But the house would have become cold by then and we would hurry to get the fires going again as soon as we came in the door.

There was a very small lean to at the back of the house, just at the kitchen door. We kept a pile of wood there all the time in the winter. It was handy to go out and pick up an armload to put in the woodbox next to the stove. Going out to the lean to for wood was another example of the automatic routine of the farm. I have gone out the door and brought in an armload of wood so often that I can still remember it in my body – how it felt.

One day I almost lost a finger, bringing in that wood. I had my thin, gold wedding band on, and I had a habit of swinging myself out the door with my left hand. On this occasion my ring caught in the lock on the door jam and while the rest of my body went swinging on out into the lean to, my finger stayed right there on the door.

It was very painful. Dave had to cut my ring to get it off. It had cut into the skin of my finger quite deeply, and I still have an indentation there where it cut. But ice made it feel better, and it healed well. I learned another lesson – don’t wear rings on the farm! I guess I was lucky that I didn’t lose my finger.

Our woodlot was an enchanted place for me. Our very own woods. After our experience with trying to heat a house with wet wood on the Berry Farm, we were faithful in our yearly excursions to the woods to cut wood. We always made sure we got the wood in in time for it to dry before winter. I guess we started cutting it in August. That was the best time. We would cut the trees down, and then cut them in long pieces and bring them in to the yard by trudk. Then we would unload the truck. From then on, the boys and Dave would take time whenever they could to saw up the pieces and then to split them.

Once the wood was split, it had to be stacked. That was what I loved the most, stacking the wood and making a neat woodpile by the side of the house. We became connossieurs of woodstacks. We would admire the large and neat woodstacks that we saw at the farmers’ homes when we drove by. However, I can remember too, times when our woodpile remained just that, a pile, heaped up high in the middle. The wood dried that way, too, but it wasn’t very efficient, digging out sticks of wood when they were frozen and we were in a hurry. The woodpile was the sign that we were having trouble keeping up with all the chores.

There was always a lot to be done, and some things just had to be done on time – like getting in the hay before the rain, but that is another story.

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