As the children got to
work on the milk-soaked bread, we had to figure out how to warm the kitchen, as
the portable oil stove was not practical for daily use. The walls of the house
were stone, the floor ceramic tile, and even though I had opened the shutters
of all the rooms, the weak morning sun had little effect on the chill inside.
Because of that, I had insisted the children wear sweaters and socks, so they
were fairly happy as they chatted and laughed over their breakfast. But, they
would soon be chilled if we didn’t hurry up and heat the house.
The kitchen stove was a
wide, cast-iron contraption with four round covers on top, a wide center-door
down below that opened to the main wood box, and a narrow side-door that was for
the oven. On the right side, a black,
cylindrical, metal chimney pipe extended from the back of the stove and
disappeared into the wall. I presumed it went outside. We pried open one of the
round covers on the stove-top and peered in. Ashes from the day before lay on
the bottom, gray and cold. Someone had thoughtfully piled wood in a bucket next
to the stove, so all we had to do was figure out how to light it. Neither of us
had actually lit a wood stove and we hadn’t camped, so this was a challenge.
George had a vague
recollection of using the stove when he had lived at Gabi in his teens, but his
parents usually lit it while he was in charge of chopping and transporting the
wood. I dredged up memories from our first home in Canada, where the only
source of heat for warmth as well as for cooking had come from two wood stoves.
But my parents had always taken care of that, while I peered at them from afar.
We were the grown-ups now, and it was our turn to figure it out for
ourselves.
I remembered we needed to start a flame with twigs,
and then hope the logs we placed on top of them caught fire. We looked for
twigs in the bucket but found none. I had a sudden vision of how my mother had
lit the stove after arriving home from work on a snowy day in Canada. Paper! I grabbed pages from a newspaper left
by the cousins, crumpled them, and pushed them into the bottom of the main wood
box. Then we placed two smaller pieces of wood on top of them. George struck
one long match and touched it to the newspaper. It went out. Of course! He lit
another, and another, until the paper finally caught. We shut the main door,
pleased with ourselves as we waited for the roar of a fire. What we got instead
was smoke. It seeped out from the stovetop covers and out through the two front
doors.
As smoke filled the kitchen we opened the balcony
doors and the one kitchen window and hurried the children into the
dining-living room. I gave them the books and crayons from the plane ride to
keep them busy and out of our hair. Closing the door almost completely, I kept
one eye on them and the other on George who poked at the logs in the stove
trying to figure out what was wrong. From out of my past came a sudden memory
and I called out “Damper!” That triggered George’s memory of a knob on the
chimney pipe that had to be pushed, or was it pulled? or turned? He found the knob, and I watched as he fiddled
with it, while behind me the children crowded back into the kitchen to see what
was happening. I herded them out again, worried about all that smoke in their
lungs. We hadn’t left smog behind in America only to damage them with smoke in
Italy.
After a few minutes the
stove stopped spewing smoke and began to draw. While the smoke dissipated, the kitchen
began to fill with fresh cold air from the open doors and window. Soon we were
smokeless, but even colder. While he was airing out the kitchen, I dressed the
children in shoes and jackets. Fortunately the larger logs caught fire, and
eventually the kitchen was warm enough to let the children back in. George and
I sat down with relief and laughed at our antics of the previous hour.
We still hadn’t
eaten or had coffee or tea, but our first major hurdles had been overcome. The
children had been fed, and we had heat. It seemed a lot of effort for such
minor matters, and I began to suspect that life on the farm in northern Italy
with four young children might be a wee bit more complicated than I had
envisioned.
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