A Winter’s Reverie

February 13, 1996

“Abide the change of time,
Quake in the present winter’s state and wish
That warmer days would come.”

Shakespeare, CYMBELINE

While I live comfortably in a Sarasota “winter,” the severe winter in the Northeast and Midwest called up a childhood memory. This recollection was also triggered by the request of grandchildren to know more about my early days and family memories.

The small house at 32 Oliver Street was equipped with a coal/wood burning furnace in the cellar and a black iron coal/wood kitchen stove. The containers for trash pick-up were “ash barrels”, not garbage cans. The ashes were also used to spread over icy steps and sidewalks. Some home gardeners dug in ashes in the vegetable plot for fertilizer.

Taking out ashes was a daily chore. We also sifted the ashes to reclaim the coals, or coke, which were not completely burned. Although I have no memory of doing it myself, there were boys and men who walked the railroad tracks to pick up coal thrown or shaken from the steam locomotives (no diesel or electric then).

On very cold nights, I have vivid memories of sitting by the kitchen stove, with the oven door open, while (of course) reading. When the weather was frigid and the stove well-stoked with anthracite coal, the top of the stove would turn color from black iron to red-hot – literally, the top would be a glowing cherry-red.

Because my parents could not always afford to have coal delivered by the ton into the cellar coal bin, sometimes the kitchen stove was the only heat in the house. Then, when bedtime came, the flat-irons which had been on top of the stove were wrapped in old cloths and placed under the blankets thus comfortably warming the bed, at least for awhile.

There is a childhood memory which I have thought about many times, although there are gaps in the recollections. After all, it is seventy-eight years since I was six or seven years old; and memories can play tricks.

I’m fairly sure it was the winter of 1918. Because of the World War, there were shortages. In this case, the difficulty may have been getting the coal delivered. For whatever reason, there was no coal in the house and the weather was bitterly cold.

There was coal available in a place in Malden, about three miles away. But it had to be picked up, no delivery was available. In my memory, in those days coal was brought by horse and coal-wagon. Icy streets were a hazardous and sometimes fatal trip for the work-horses.

At that time my parents had no automobile. My father must have been at work. My mother took my sled and me to go get a hundred pound bag of coal. The snow was coming down steadily. Why wasn’t I in school? I don’t know. Maybe there was “no school” because of the snowstorm; maybe it was Saturday. Who took care of my sister, then about four years old? I don’t know.

I have a memory-image of crossing Broadway (Everett’s main thoroughfare) from High Street to Hancock Street. I recall helping to tug the burlap bag containing the coal onto the sled and helping pull the sled. But a seven-year-old boy could not have been much help, even though the last third of the journey home was down-hill. How my mother managed, I have no idea. She was always thin, but she must have had a wiry strength.

As the years went on, more and more homes had oil-burning furnaces and installed oil-burners in kitchen ranges. But these devices were never installed at 32 Oliver Street.
I have a more precise memory of the time a few months after my father’s accidental death when Uncle John Granstrom had about 20/25 dining room table tops delivered for the stove and furnace. I don’t know where Uncle John acquired the tables. They were the round variety which would get a fair amount of dollars these days, although then they were not antiques.

The tables were veneered – walnut or oak veneer over cheaper woods – certainly not the pressed sawdust or composition board found under veneers today. The veneer over the wood inside made the tables the very devil to chop. I had to smash them with a sledge hammer first; then chop with a long-handled axe. This must have been a short time before I went to work afternoons and Saturdays at the John T. Connor grocery store.

As I look back, that hard work swinging the sledge and axe may have been therapeutic, although that was not Uncle John’s intention. He was just doing a good turn for my mother. But the labor may have vented some of the anger that I felt and didn’t express. I was angry because my father was dead – angry at him, angry at God (I was not yet an agnostic), angry at Uncle John because he survived, angry at my cousin Henry because his father survived the boating accident which took the lives of my father and Andrew Granstrom, Uncle John’s brother.

The labor with sledge and axe may have helped – although when I reflect, I didn’t get over that trauma for many years. Perhaps I never have, fully.