Sitting by the Woodstove, Pondering

I am sitting by a warm wood stove in the cold months of the year. Life doesn’t get much better than this. I have turned the living room chair so that my feet dangle eight inches from the cast iron. There is about a fifteen degree temperature difference from my toes to my ears. I lean over to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf along the wall and without moving any part of my body besides my arm and eyes, I grab Regarding Willingness by Tom Harpole. Lest anyone think I am a book snob who reads philosophy books in the pre-dawn lamp light, I must clarify that this is a local author. One hundred pages from a guy who lives 50 miles from my front door, telling tales of horse logging, chainsaw incidents, rescuing people who have fallen into the dumpsters at the Powell County transfer station. And a story about skydiving with Russian cosmonauts, but hey, there are some local folks around here who have led unbelievably interesting lives that you will likely never hear about.

And so here I am, with my book and my hot cocoa. Cocoa because I don’t drink coffee. Because I am 32 years old but still have the taste buds of a twelve year old. There is a pile of Halloween candy on the table, Starbursts and Skittles. Going to hold off on those for now. I just had Frosted Flakes for breakfast. Seriously, twelve years old in so many aspects of my life. 

Except for the fact that it is 5:30 in the morning on a Thursday and I am awake. Twelve-year-old me woke up once at 5:30 to catch an airplane to Europe with my whole family but that’s it. But otherwise, I was sleeping at least until six thirty before I had to get awoken by Mom and dragged to the school bus in the cold and dark of early November. It was playoff season for high school football and I was dragging. Middle school state championship would be coming up the following weekend; all I did was school, practice, eat and sleep. Not that it helped much. We still got our butts kicked. First of four state championship losses in five years. Still love football though; I go to all the local home games and stand at the top of the bleachers muttering about a fast outside linebacker or a missed block. Without kids or family in the game, I figure it is a little much for me to be screaming at other people’s children in the same way that I scream at football on the TV. But I clap and holler when the tailback gets the pitch and rumbles 40 yards without being touched. Watching Ben watch football; the favorite pastime of my non-sporting friends. 

They would sit on the couch facing me as I sat in a recliner much the same as I am sitting now. Except, instead of a wood stove, there was a TV three feet from my face. So bright that the light from the commercials reflected off my skin. My friends couldn’t even see the TV from their vantage point. They just sat with their bowls of quinoa and black beans and bottles of PBR and heckled me as I yelled out the play calls and mistakes at a team of grown men playing a game over two thousand miles away, as if I was the defensive coordinator. Sigh… some things never change. I suspect I will be doing the same thing this weekend. My Vikings play the Cowboys.

But for now, the TV is off. There are orange cracks in the side of the woodstove, showing hints of the glow within. It is a wood stove unlike any other. On the front, stamped in the cast iron is the patent from 1912, forged in Hamilton, Ohio. It was a coal stove riding in the caboose of a passenger train for the first few decades of life. How it ended up in my uncle’s backyard covered in weeds and shredded tarps will remain a lifelong mystery. But that is where I found it and hauled it out to my house, where Sam and I went after it with wire-wheel brushes and stove-black goo. Now it sits proudly in the living room like a little pudgy gnome with a chimney sprouting from its head. A cast iron pot that I found at the hardware store steams humidity back into the vaulted ceiling of the living room. I look up at the ceiling fan, rescued from a dumpster, slightly crooked, creaking and wobbling as it spins, pushing the warm air back down on my chair. 

Overall, not a bad start to the morning. The thermometer reads 13 degrees outside. The sun will be up in an hour or so, and it will melt the frost on my windshield. I always leave the truck facing east for that very reason. I will be off to work in the fog of my own breath. But for now, I will kick back and keep my toes warm and wait for the sun.