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The Stove

“But I enjoy the four seasons.” It’s a phrase uttered by northerners who are reluctant to clean out their house and move. Personally, I’m not in love with the cold weather and I don’t like the work that snow dumps on me.  Perhaps, if I could look out the window at the pristine whiteness until it melts, I’d feel differently. The idyllic hours of counting snowflakes are followed by hours of snow shoveling and days of questioning:  Is it icy? I wonder where I can park the car?

I get a seasonal flashback to a short story I read when I was about ten called The Stove. It was a wilderness, pioneer story of a couple in a lonely cabin on the prairie. Realizing that they needed some provisions because a storm was imminent the husband sets out on horseback. He leaves his young wife with the warning don’t let the stove go out.

This winter has been intensified not only by the cold and the snow but the virtual schooling for my grandchildren and learning that my trip to St Maarten needed to be canceled for the third time in this pandemic. I am delirious with cabin fever.

My day is monotonous enough without any of nature’s help. I go up and down the stairs to verify that the second grader and four grader are zooming or to photograph their assignments that have maxxed out my phone storage. Then I come downstairs to a kindergartener who often wants to be dragged by his ankles from the family room to his work station. This is a negotiated arrangement that he loves. Go figure. The woman in the story watched the greyness of the winter sky turn into a blizzard of snowflakes. Particularly this year, I thought about her pacing back and forth on the cold, dirt floor as she watched the snow pile up and the embers flicker in the stove. Her only solace was the down comforter because in these stories there is always a down comforter.

My obsession is wrappers. The small glossy paper/plastic wrappers that hold Lil Bites brownies or granola bars, or fruit snack or potato chips or any of a dozen items that are the main stay of a child’s diet. The small consumer always leaves the wrappers behind. Those slick, slippery containers hover like a drone just above the kitchen garbage can. They contain the food of choice, if you call it that, of my cherished little ones. But if I have to punch down one more wrapper into the garbage …

The pioneer woman watched her husband ride off. The snow begins to fall. It blizzards and the wind blusters until it covers the one small window in the cabin. The woman puts log after log on the fire. She eats a small bowl of venison stew.

I’ve had venison, that alone could kill you.  Several days go by or it feel like it because she finished mending and darning the socks. She paces about the small cabin and panics when she put the last log on the fire. This pioneer woman put on her threadbare cloak and takes the axe into the front yard but she is too small and weak to chop more than a few pieces of frozen wood. Back in the cabin she tosses the log on the fire.  But what next? She knows that she doesn’t have the strength to chop any more wood. She needs a plan.  The stove must not go out. The wind blows the door in. She braces the door with some furniture. The furniture! Perhaps, that she could chop up the furniture. But she collapses on the bed with the down comforter before she can.

Eighteen inches of snow eliminated the path to our barbecue grill, a small comfort that had been sustaining many of our dinners during our eleven-month lockdown. The news reports a far more desperate and deadly situation in Texas. Texans aren’t prepared for the cold, never mine snow and ice. I’m accustomed to the worry for loved ones on the road in storms. But no electric? No heat? What would we do?  No one is prepared for that. No one.

For me a winter’s snow is a lifetime drudge. Another winter, another storm to go out to clear the snow from the cars, the driveways and the sidewalks. For a short time, the snow limits my world, that has shrunk so much in the last year. The woman in the story thought about chopping her furniture into pieces and throwing it in the stove to keep herself warm. The story ended with her husband trying to wake her and offering broth to drink. The loneliness, fear and hunger had gotten the best of her. Maybe coping is the lowest form of human existence but it helps us survive until the next day.

I think about my thrice cancelled trip and the warmth and the palm trees. In this moment my concerns are minuscule, if I put one more, thin styrofoam container of unicorn mac and cheese oozes its starchy foam onto the microwave turntable I’m going to scream.