The Minnesota Farm Woman

My husband was going out-of-town last week and left me a pile of kindling “just in case you want to have a fire.” I love a warm crackling fire and we do try to heat with wood as much as possible, but if we heated solely with wood and it was left up to me, we would most certainly freeze to death.  I don’t know why I can’t start a decent fire.  I crumple the paper. I put a few pieces of kindling on top and light a match, or two or three. The flame sputters and goes out. I add bark and more kindling. It sputters and smokes, and the smoke always manages to come in the house rather than up the chimney. I finally get a weak little flame, and spend the next 15 minutes crumpling up balls of paper and tossing them in until it finally catches. I add a small log, smothering  the fire which promptly goes out, and I have to start all over again. HE can start with a piece of paper the size of an envelope, two damp twigs and one match and have a roaring fire within minutes. Our first year here after moving back from Florida we upgraded the furnace in our house. We put a lot of money and thought into this furnace, and it wasn’t working right. It needed a part, which of course was on back order from Saudi Arabia or from somebody somewhere that  didn’t much care how cold or dark  it gets in Minnesota in November.   My husband was heading down south to visit his family, and I was to keep  the home fires burning, so to speak.  When I got home from work one day the house was freezing and the temperatures were plummeting.  Twenty years in Florida had thinned my blood and made me feel the cold even more.  Luckily, we still had the wood furnace hooked up, so I headed down the basement to give it a try. I burned the whole stack of  newspapers, used up all the kindling and made three trips down the basement and got nothing but a weak puny little flame that couldn’t even be called a fire. My hands and feet were stiff with cold.  The pipes in the laundry room froze.  I was huddled in the living room wrapped in a blanket with the oven on when the phone rang. You guessed it. It was my loving husband calling from a warm and toasty southern state. I opened my mouth to say something, but promptly burst into tears instead, which surprisingly didn’t freeze on my cheeks. Needless to say, he phoned the furnace people the next day, and whatever he told them worked, because they suddenly came up with the needed part.  I suspected but didn’t  even care that the words “hysterical female” were probably included in the conversation.  I stopped at the hardware store the next day after work and bought a big electric heater, one that oscillates and warms up a whole room quickly.  We also put in a fireplace upstairs that keeps us toasty warm.  If he’s not home to start the fire, though, I turn up the thermostat and crawl under the electric blanket. I hate to admit it, but there’s still a little bit of Florida in this Minnesota Farm Woman.