Monday, November 15, 2004
Till The Shivers Disappeared!
Mrs. DoF ‘s comment on the previous post triggered a memory long forgotten.
As children I and my three brothers were raised in a farming area. We didn’t farm ourselves but our home was situated between two farms. We had a two story house that was heated by a coal stove in the livingroom. Heat went upstairs through vents in the downstairs ceilings. No pipes to direct the heat.
When we got up for school in the winter it was not unusual to see four shivering children huddled around the stove trying to dress and get warm at the same time. Returning home at night our hands and faces were cold and ugly red. Our feet were wet because we waded in the deep snow over the top of our boots. It was a sight to see the four of us, noses runing, tears falling, and jumping up and down in front of the stove.
Bath time was almost as much of a trial. My Mother warm the water on the kitchen stove and poured it into a round wash tub on the kitchen floor. She also used one of those round, metal, electric doughnuts that you plug into the outlet to heat water to warm up the tub water as it cooled. If you were little the tub was great to use. But for us older kids it was a test. You could sit down in it but your feet and legs hung out over the outside of the tub. This made it difficult to wash said parts without getting water all over the floor. With each child the water got a little dirtier because fresh water for each of us was out of the question.
But as I remember those days it was a good time to be alive. You didn’t need to lock your doors. You could play tag in the evening, running the fields, hiding from each other with no fear of being harmed. In the winter when the snow fell we would trudge over to Gebert’s back field and slide down the hill onto the frozen creek. Then we would hurry back home to take our places in front of the old coal stove until the shivers disappeared!
