Fire in the living room

where it should be

My husband was born at least a hundred years too late. Maybe 500. He would have thrived in the 1600s when Europeans were just coming to America and had to work their brains out for every berry and morsel of meat. I could see him being buddies with the local indians right up until they tried to scalp him. He has that fighting spirit that helped people survive back then.

Sometimes he channels his inner pioneer, but without the hauling of wagons over high Sierra passes to get to California. If there is a harder way to do something, he will find it and have more fun than a day at Six Flags doing it.

When our children were small, sometimes they complained that Dad never wanted to have any fun. All he ever wanted to do was work. I had a hard time convincing them that Dad WAS having fun. In his mind, there was nothing better than a day spent with the family cutting fallen trees off a friend’s barn, stacking the firewood, and hauling the brush to the middle of the pasture to be burned. Work is his BFF. We once went to Disney World with the five kids, ages 8-16, and Ben says it was the most stressful week of his life. He couldn’t wait to get home and start a new project.

In the early days of our marriage we lived in rented houses. Then Ben went in the Navy and we lived in base housing for a few years. By the time we had four children and changed duty stations, we bought our first home north of Memphis and Ben did not waste any time making work.

He plowed up the back third of our half-acre for a vegetable garden. Planted fruit trees. Put in two rows of pine trees between us and the neighbors for a little privacy and shade. Then came the wood stove.

I’d had fireplaces in my youth, and even a wood stove insert that sat inside the fireplace when I was a teen, so I wasn’t completely new to this concept of burning wood for heat. But this was a stand-alone stove with a pipe that would go through the ceiling and attic and out the roof. For some reason I was very uneasy with the whole idea of free-standing fire inside the house. It felt loose and wild and out of the control.

Ben explained all the intricacies of double- and triple-wall pipe and safety this and damper that and how people do this all the time and think of the money we will save on heat bills and how toasty warm we will be etc.

Eventually I got used to the wood stove and we have had one in every house since then. I’ve learned to appreciate the warmth, especially when the power is out, and live with the mess. Every dog we’ve ever had has learned the joy of curling up in front of a toasty fire. They learn it from me.

Since we are now in our forever home (at least that’s the theory), Ben wanted to have a beautiful-looking stove, so he sent me to our dear friends’ store to pick one out. If you’re ever in the Asheville, North Carolina, area, you need to stop by Wright’s Hearth, Heat, and Home in Arden. Their showroom is so pretty with an array of wood and pellet stoves and gas logs, and they offer all the services you need to install and maintain them. They are the greatest kind of people—they and their sons—and they have been our besties for a very long time. This is not the first wood stove they’ve installed for us.

Ben wanted a soapstone stove, so I went to look. Of course I chose the biggest one, not because we need that much heat, but because I like the stone on that one the best. So our friends put our name on it and there it sat while we built and built and built.

Finally last weekend we were ready and they had time to bring the stove and install it, all the way from Asheville to Virginia.

You might be wondering, as I was, how you get a 600 lb wood stove out of the back of a truck and into a living room. I was too nervous to watch, but it involves a tractor with forks and a lot of straps getting it to the back porch through 18 inches of mud, then a super-duty power hand truck rolling it inside.

They covered the floor with drop cloths and then laid down OSB so the weight would not damage the wood floor. While it was still on this gadget, Tom showed me that each Hearthstone stove is signed by the person who makes it:

Thanks, Crystal!

Once the stove was inside, the platform it sits on had to be centered under the ceiling box, which was installed along with the pipe that goes through the attic and the roof when the house was framed, before sheetrock went up. (I wish we’d had this foresight about shower doors, but that’s another story for another day.) Then the stove gets placed and it, too, has to be centered. This involves a plumb line and a lot of mathing that went over my head, but Tom and Ben set it perfectly.

Then came the pipe from the stove to the ceiling. This is double-wall so we don’t have to have any kind of protection between it and the wall.

There is the inevitable cutting 1/4 inch here, 1/2 inch there to make it fit perfectly, then it all gets screwed in place. Also, Ben was running back and forth between helping Tom and licking the spatula from the cake I was making. I promised Tom I would tell the world he was left hanging for a cake-batter spatula. These are true friends.

Finally the whole thing was hooked up and we were ready for a fire, but wait . . . If our buddy Tom is one thing, he is an educator. He spent a good amount of time convincing us that this stove was unlike all the others we’d ever had. You don’t just make a roaring fire in a soapstone stove. It doesn’t act like cast iron or steel. It has its own personality, its own process (he likes that word), and you have to respect it.

Then we were ready for actual fire. Start small. Be patient. Give it time to warm up.

Okay, maybe we didn’t start small enough. We might be a tad impatient. We hate being cold and we hate paying electric bills.

But look at that. It’s perfect and it was made for this space.

Yesterday afternoon our friends had gone home and it was a cold, rainy day. Ben and I made a little fire (I promise it was little) and sat in the living room in the utter silence staring at this blessing that represents a life built together doing hard things and sharing it all with the sweetest of friends who over the years have given and given and given some more until we are pressed down, and shaken together, and running over. I will never look at this wood stove and not give thanks for them, Tom and Karen and Josh and Levi, and for the gift they are to us.

. . . God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy. (1 Timothy 6:17)