Get the Chill Out

One Day Without a Furnace and Your Humble Writer is a Wreck (Day 79)

The other day, our furnace stopped. It was 16 degrees outside. In the end, it was fine, just some doohicky or thing-a-ma-bob that needed replacing, not expensive or time consuming. Thankfully.

What was challenging, however, is that it took the repairmen a full 24 hours to get to us, which meant a night without heat. Or you know, furnace heat.

There was a solid couple hours of prep work to do to make sure our pipes (and us) didn’t freeze. We picked up a couple more space heaters and set them up in the utility room and wherever there were pipes. We stocked our fireplace. We turned on the oven to heat the kitchen. We wore sweaters and brought up the extra blankets.

I slept downstairs to make sure nothing went wrong and the space heaters didn’t, who knows, overheat or burst into flames or something. So, aside from being tired in the morning, the furnace man came and went, the heat clicked back on and later today, I’ll put away the extra firewood.

And that’s it.

I’m left feeling both thankful that we live in such a hard earned but privileged way that a few hours of a busted furnace doesn’t cost us much to repair AND not kill us, but also a newfound respect for those that - now listen to this, don’t have a furnace at all and warm their houses with wood stoves. I know, right? Crazy!

I actually had to have a conversation after all this with somebody who did that. I’m such a pampered baby that I didn’t even know how that would work. You mean you leave a fire burning all day, even when you’re gone? How does the heat get to the whole house? What if Market Basket is closed, where do you get the wood?

My grandparents (not to mention great swaths of the world at large) would be horrified by my lack of understanding. I have these vague memories of walking into my uncle’s house passed this huge bin of coal with coal scoops and buckets. Oh my goodness, I bet they used that coal to heat their house!

I’m sort of joking here, of course, but only sort of. There’s lots of wood stoves around these parts in New Hampshire so it isn’t really that new or difficult. It’s not all Little House on the Prairie. Plus, I have a vague sense that coffee would taste good warmed on a wood stove. Still, one day in January for me and I’m sleepy and my back hurts. I need to go chop wood or something. I need to toughen up.

How about all of you? Any wood stovers out there?