An Open Fire Kindles Memories

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

January 16, 1960

   ONE OF the good things about winter in the north country is that it gives you an excuse to enjoy the fireplace.  An open fire spells comfort.  It invites you to take off your shoes.  No tranquilizer pill has yet been marketed to rival it as a relaxing agent.

   You can doze and dream by a fire, forget about time and responsibility, and feel no need for talk.  I never spend an evening at the glowing hearth without wondering why I don't do so oftener.

   THE OPEN FIRE has warmed and charmed men for ages, buffalo hunters and trail riders, cowpokes and pioneers moving west, Indians and adventurers.  I gaze into the glow and am one with Kit Carson and Jebediah Smith and the mountain men.  I'm a kid again, camped in the shadow of the continental divide in Montana, patrolling the ridge by day and sitting around the campfire at night swapping yarns with Vern Smith, the smoke-chaser.

   Or I'm in the kitchen of my parental home, thawing out after skating on the slough, seated by the range with my feet in the oven.

   HEAT WAS NOT an impersonal, taken-for-granted boon then.  It meant chopping wood, carrying coal and hauling out ashes.  It was worked for and prized.  And the stove, though a stern taskmaster, was friend and comforter.  Central heat is far more efficient but I've never felt any such kinship with a radiator.

   None of the houses I lived in as a boy had either a fireplace or furnace.  Stoves were spotted in various rooms but it was always chilly around the fringes and in bitter weather, if you wandered eight feet away from the stove, you were cold.

   The range in the kitchen and a pot-bellied, bowlegged monster in the living room were supposed to throw enough heat to warm the dining room, too.  Occasionally they did.

   THE ONLY bedroom boasting a stove was the one off the bath.  This glowed red on Saturday nights and occasionally at other times when the fastidious felt the need of an ablution.

   I recall once pushing my brother into this throbbing heater when we were snapping towels at each other and horsing around after bathing.  The consequences were considerable and the tragedy chilled our relationship for years.

   Of an evening the family would gather in the parlor, open the door to the stove, gaze at the coals, chomp apples and popcorn and know that life could never be better.

   Or someone would wind up the Victrola and John McCormack would give out with "The Sunshine of Your Smile" or dad would read Dickens or Ring Lardner.

   THE YEARS are many and long but those days defy forgetting.  Simple times and simple diversions--a rite of family fusion in the warmth of a fire.

   Memories of boyhood well up strong and poignantly and I wonder, as I sit looking at the fire which represents all those long-dead fires in the kitchen range and the bowlegged stove, whether my own children will be able to look back on occasions comparably enriching.  They've had a great deal more, of course--but also a great deal less.

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