State

tty GKOVER BIU\k>lA\ The Day The Stove Blew Up Ли ad venture in rural liv¬ ing — a* il used lo be. farm. He got paid once a year, on Christmas day. I believe. He never asked for a raise, or fringe benefits. Red was merely part of the farm family. He had one glaring fault, forever los¬ ing something. One day mother was sweeping the floor of his bedroom, and when she went to dump the din into the kitchen stove, she saw a flash of green go sizzling off the dustpan, made a grab for it. She got a slightly singed tvventy- dollar bill out of the fire. Red never could figure out how it got on the floor, all folded up into a little wad. Red liked to hunt rabbits, and he was a crack shot with a small .22 riffle. He prov ided the meat for many a meal w ith that trusty rifle. But on the day that the front room stove "let go," Red had lost something. We noticed that he searched his pockets several times, with that puzzled frown on his face. Mother questioned him at dinner, but he merely smiled and said it didn't amount to much, and would she please pass the chicken? After dinner the snow started, and it wasn’t a "fitten day" to do anything but read and play dominoes, and that’s what we were doing when the old stove blew up. That is. pop was reading the Bible out loud to ma and my sister Eileen. Red and my baby sister, Katie, were playing dominoes, and I was whittling a shingle gun. back of the stove. Pop looked up presently, said it was getting a mile chilly in his corner and would I throw a block of wood into the stove? I yanked out a hunk of firewood from the woodbox. opened a top lid of the stove, and dropped it in. It was a big. hollow piece of wood. I thought I noticed a mouse’s nest or something inside the rotted cavity as I Recently while 1 was talking to a group of teens. I was amazed that none knew what 1 was reminiscing about when I mentioned the different stoves we had in the farm house owned by my parents. "A stove in the kitchen, in the front room, the bedrooms and the bathroom even?" one of the teens asked, disbelief on his face. Well, my young friend, we didn’t have a stove in the bathroom, for a bath¬ room was not one of the luxuries in the old farm house. What shocks me is the fact that an entire generation of youngsters have grown up without knowing about those good old wood-buming stoves that were pan of every farm home in the land. In my family, we dated things from a momentous mid-winter Sunday that I’ll lag simply as "the day the front- room stove blew up!” When 1 men¬ tioned this to the teens, one of them suddcntly asked: "How could this stove explode? There is no explosive combustion in wood as it feeds an open fire. I’d say you’re pulling our legs!” With due respect to this young world- changer. I was not pulling legs. But to tell you how the stove blew up. I must first relate a few incidents about a hired man who went by the name of Red. He was a lovable sort of guy, lanky, with a crop of ruffled carrot hair that never got combed. He was a fixture on the the STATE. November ism