sorry, but there was no room in our budget for coal. We'd have to devise
other ways to stay warm.
Pieces of coal were always falling off the trucks when they made their
deliveries, and Brian suggested that he and I get a bucket and collect
some. We were walking along Little Hobart Street, picking up pieces of
coal, when our neighbors the Noes drove by in their station wagon. The
Noe girls, Karen and Carol, were sitting in the backward-facing jump
seat, looking out the rear window. "We're working on our rock
collection!" I shouted.
The pieces we found were so small that after an hour we'd filled only
half the bucket. We needed at least a bucket to keep a fire going for one
evening. So while we made occasional coal-collecting expeditions, we
used mostly wood. We couldn't afford wood any more than we could
afford coal, and Dad wasn't around to chop and split any, which meant it
was up to us kids to gather dead branches and logs from the forest.
Finding good, dry wood was a challenge. We trekked along the
mountainside, looking for pieces that weren't waterlogged or rotten,
shaking the snow off branches. But we went through the wood awfully
quickly, and while a coal fire burns hot, a wood fire doesn't throw off
much heat. We all huddled around the potbellied stove, wrapped in
blankets, holding out our hands toward the weak, smoky heat. Mom said
we should be thankful because we had it better than pioneers, who didn't
have modern conveniences like window glass and cast-iron stoves.
One day we got a roaring fire going, but even then we could still see our
breath, and there was ice on both sides of the windows. Brian and I
decided we needed to make the fire even bigger and went out to collect
more wood. On the way back, Brian stopped and looked at our house.
"There's no snow on our roof," he said. He was right. It had completely
melted. "Every other house has snow on its roof," he said. He was right
about that, too.