David Cohen illustration
On winter mornings, the smell wood smoke in the air reminds me of my family’s wood stove.
Our wood-fired cook stove stood in the dining room near the table. It was cast iron with white enamel trim and had several cooking eyes, a water reservoir, and a baking oven.
Every year, my father bought a supply of oak wood; logs that had to be split with an ax and stored in our backyard woodshed. We regularly carried armsful of firewood and kindling into the house to fill the wood box, as my father liked to keep a heaping pile of wood handy.
We had an electric range in the kitchen and used our wood stove mainly as a heat source, though my mother sometimes did cook on it.
During my childhood, the dining room was the warmest room in the house, and even after I was grown and gone, my father kept a hearty fire going.
One winter day while I was visiting, my mother and I were heating a pot of soup on the wood stove. The fire was crackling and radiating heat when I looked up to see flames shooting from the top of the stove pipe around the flue.
“The ceiling’s catching on fire!” I cried, and my mother quickly closed the stove’s side damper to starve the fire of oxygen.
I rushed to the laundry room just off the kitchen and grabbed the fire extinguisher, and though I’d never used one, I knew to pull the locking pin, aim the nozzle, and squeeze the lever. I saturated the flue and ceiling with foam, dousing the flames. Foam dripped from the scorched ceiling, covering the stovetop and filling the soup pot.
Meanwhile, my father watched television in the front room, oblivious to the near catastrophe.
As it turned out, the mishap was caused by a vigorous fire roaring up the flue and the ceiling tiles being positioned too close for safety. The carpenter who had installed the new ceiling had failed to place a fire stop plate around the flue. Needless to say, repairs were made and the stove could be used afterwards without incident.
“The woodstove saved us during the blizzard,” my mother said, recalling the unusual snowstorm in March 1993 that buried the region under 18 inches of snow and trapped us all inside without electricity for a week. Due to the power outage, my older brother and his wife hunkered down with my parents, as their own electric heating system was disabled.
“We huddled around the stove to stay warm,” my mother reminisced, noting that they also cooked on the stove during that week.
“We survived,” she said, proud to have provided sanctuary for her family.
My mother was no stranger to wood stoves, having grown up with one in her family’s kitchen in the Clinchfield cotton mill village.
“We heated water on the woodstove and filled a big galvanized tub and took baths behind the woodstove. Nobody could see you back there.”
She recalled the meals her mama cooked on that woodstove, especially a meal prepared for her when she returned home from the hospital after being hit by a Model T.
“As I walked through the front door, I smelled creamed corn simmering on the wood stove. Mama knew creamed corn was my favorite food.”
Though my mother was fond of her own wood stove and had enjoyed using one for decades, she knew when it was time to let it go. My father had passed away, and a wood stove involved a lot of work—stocking wood, maintaining the fire, carrying out the ashes, and having the chimney sweep inspect and clean everything each fall.
The house had central heating downstairs anyway, so the woodstove wasn’t necessary anymore. She traded it for a gas Buck Stove to use in the event of a power outage, but never needed to use it.
Even today on chilly mornings, the pungent smell of wood smoke rising from a neighboring chimney reminds me of past winter days and the wood stove that offered my family years of comfort.