Heat

It is below freezing here in New England. I searched for long underwear and my warmest gloves and hat before setting off for a walk with Calley yesterday. I had to walk on the roads, too. Ice and crunchy snow made it slow going in the woods. I resist this time of year. I don't like the cold as a general rule. These days, one of us makes a fire in the woodstove every morning. Thanks to David's vigilance in keeping a pile of wood and kindling by the dark green Jotul, I don't have to go outside. My shoulders relax as the heat begins to radiate out into the room.

The "Jotul" and David lived here for five years before I arrived. This house, which had only four rooms when he bought it, had a non-functioning hot-air furnace. On the cold day in January when he left his Cambridge apartment and moved out to Lincoln, he stopped at The Fireplace Shop at the Fresh Pond rotary and bought the little stove, put it in the back of "The Rumbler" (his green Rambler station wagon) and headed out Route 2. It was his sole source of heat for years.

Around the time I moved in, David installed a new furnace with a fan. We called it "the groaner." When we turned it on, the fan would groan like an animal in the basement. It sent hot air up through the floor registers (and ancestral dust circulated as well) until the air in the house hit a certain temperature; then it would switch off and the temperature in the house would plummet and the groaning would begin again. It was not an ideal heat system. On the November day that we brought baby Carrie home from the hospital, David made his first ever trip to the Burlington mall to buy an electic oil circulating heater from Sears to put next to her crib.

When the groaner finally croaked, we were tired of "fried air" and a drafty house. We invested in a hot water heat system which involved threading copper pipes through the walls that attached to heavy cast iron radiators and the most glorious thing of all: radiant heating in the kitchen floor. It barely mattered that we lived with holes in the sheet rock walls for years as a result of the pipe installation. The house was finally, evenly warm.

And yet, on a chilly winter morning or at the end of the day, there is nothing better than standing next to a wood stove to get deeply warm. So the Jotul is still the center of our attention when it is cold. And we are not the only ones who love it. As the green enamel begins to heat up, our brown dog Calley appears out of nowhere, circles a few times, curls up on the rug, and lets out a long, contented sigh.