Cold

Cool it is. Minus twenty-three behind the chicken coop. Some would offer it is cold. Better for one’s mental health to describe it as the more pedestrian cool. Cold can be enjoyed, but you must try. Add a stiff wind and an unorthodox chill factor means you must try harder. We went skiing last night after the sundown; the wind dies off about then. Curious what we call fun.

What is so neat about skiing on a cold night is how delicious warmth is, afterward. I have wondered if many of the things we do for fun are really some sort of parenthetical imposition to better reacquaint us to the superlative list of our creature comforts. Water is most fabulous when you are really thirsty, as is food when really hungry. We do not very often allow ourselves to enter this margin of appreciation, to get so cold, thirsty or hungry as to enhance our satisfaction.

My house has a wood furnace at the far end of the cellar hole, a long established code of the farmhouse. I am of a mind to say wood heat is a holy honor of the farmhouse. A commandment, under Item A, wood heat. Items B, C, D follow in due order identifying root cellar, tater bin and wood shed respectively. These four being what is obligatory and godly to the farmhouse. Let the cold come, let the blizzard howl, it matters not, thou art loved by god and these four primes.

The awful truth here is I rather like it when winter arrives in a really foul mood, if not even feral and untamed. At about twenty-five degrees below zero I get the eerie sensation it is the farmhouse taking care of me not the other way around.

The problem with modern home design is it doesn’t allow for “the kitchen stove principle,” to deploy when winter goes blonkers. Portage County’s historical oracle Wendell Nelson has long maintained a wood-fired range is a centering principle for the house and family. Over the years Wendell has nobly worn out several wood fired kitchen ranges that with the onset of a particularly uphill gradient of cold weather were engaged to fortify the family with breads, stews, apple pies, hot cocoa, and the most sublime and surely ultimate luxury, extravagant heat. The rest of the house well might plummet to Absolute Zero but as long as “Old Silas” carried on, the kitchen enclave was a sumptuous feast. I remember similarly equipped farmhouses in my childhood. My grandfather’s happy appliance on any brutal night did create a tropic expanse in his kitchen. The thawing gloves and the barn clothes heaving up their vapors in one corner, the wood range happily snickering away on split poplar and the fixin’s for supper. I have since had a sincere attraction to that word, fixin’s.

In the guise of modernity and central heat, architecture is often at a loss of this centering appliance, so when its cohabitants are exposed to the depredations of winter, it imparts a sense of well-being. Coincidentally easier than to economize, the thermostat turned down, if one centering resource is abundantly warm. In my own case, we have engaged the latest neo-Aztec deity to so provide; a corn stove. On any normal winter night the corn stove isn’t used, it just sits there if a bit sullenly like any disremembered god, demoted to use as an end table. But come the wicked night, the malicious, the malcontent, the sulfurous dark, come the abusive, the foul-mouthed murk, and with but a half bushel of corn, a nod to the good saint Hiawatha, and all is well.

Corn stoves have been around some twenty years, evolving in the interim to fully automatic versions capable of self-starting. To call them corn stoves is a misnomer. With a grate specific to the fuel these stoves will burn anything from wood pellets to cotton seed, walnut shells, soybeans, wheat; grass clippings are not to be ignored. While it is possible to heat the entire home with such a device, the objective here is not total dependence, rather to provide that centering heat. In the tradition of the worshipful the kitchen range, whether called “Silas” or not. Modern house design routinely neglects this centering principle with a consequence to the household budget. Historically homes were winterized, the far ends closed off, but they were a people who didn’t think you could get a good night’s sleep without seeing your breath. I doubt if the average American could do this any more without an acute sense of hardship.

On cold nights neighbors dropped by my grandfather’s to share the warmth of his kitchen. Popcorn was deployed, playing cards, a neighbor brought a letter to share of a lonely Marine in the far Pacific. There was a spell about that kitchen as much as a temperature. A fireplace can perhaps have a like effect, but in my memory it was the kitchen most endowed with this warmth, exerting a gauss of magnetic attraction.

Kitchens are enjoying a popular American resurgence, magazines devoted exclusively to kitchens. Not the cooking, not the recipes, not stew or goulash, but décor, ambiance, style; granite countertops, stainless steel frig and chef-size ranges. The problem is the enactment of the universal kitchen look, when the kitchen of the Northern Territories ought not, by all that is godly, resemble the kitchen of the Piedmont, never mind the Land of Cotton. The Far Boreal kitchen has a need for the modern-day equivalent of the kitchen range, a Silas. Like the garbage burner my grandmother tended during any cold snap. In it she cremated corncobs, cereal boxes, old boards and junk mail. Her kitchen a comfort on the days the town plow couldn’t get through. I remember it didn’t matter; the town plow didn’t matter.