I had to turn on the heat the other night, so that got me to thinking about how our family kept warm when I was growing up along the Old Concord Road. Our initial “turning on” of the heat back then was accomplished by way of getting the kindling burning, then adding the coal. Our kindling was kind of like manna, fallen from Heaven, since a lot of it consisted of sticks that had once been part of the back woods forest canopy, extended over us as well by the great number of trees in our yard.
Coal is in the news a lot these days. One camp opposes any use of it for environmental reasons, and the other side says that since we have so much of it, not to use it would be a waste. I’m not going to attempt to wade into either camp here (or “step carefully,” as we used to in Mr. Cline’s cow pasture), but I will say one thing about coal that I do know from personal experience: For the greater part of my childhood, it kept me from freezing to death during the winter months over 50 years ago!
The coal heater in the living room was later replaced with another heater which burned another “geo-relic”