I remember Mom and Dad kept an old wooden chip box
on the back porch. Chips are small pieces of wood or bark that work as kindling
for a fire. We didn't have a furnace in the house at Birch Creek until about
2000, so all of our heat in the wintertime came from the wood stove in the
family room.
When you started a fire in the wood stove, you began
with paper. Usually it was newspaper or old school papers from Friday folders.
You crumpled the paper up and laid it in the middle of the stove’s belly. Then
you built a small tepee out of chips. You lit the paper with a match, and once
the chips caught fire, you gradually added larger and larger pieces of wood.
You continued this process until you had a roaring blaze pushing heat out of
the stove vents.
The fire in the stove often grew so hot the
water-filled teapot on top whistled and shot out steam like a steam engine. The
stove sat in the “stove room,” our
smaller family room, which warmed up quickly and became unbearable on several
occasions. I remember lying on the floor with my brother and sisters during
scripture study to escape some of the heat. We scooted the lower halves of our
bodies out into the cooler hallway, keeping only our heads in the room.
The chip box stood as high as my shoulder and as far
across as my arms could reach, but it must have been smaller than I remember.
The outside was gray and worn—probably from sitting out in the weather. The box
had a heavy hinged wooden lid that closed unevenly over the top. It sat on the
porch butted up against rough gray bricks on the outside of the chimney.
One of the most loathed jobs of my childhood
involved filling that chip box. Dan and I normally went with the wheelbarrow to
the back of the house and behind the wash house to the old wood pile. Dad
usually split logs and stacked wood there, so it was a good place to find
chips. If there were no chips behind the wash house, we ventured out past the
shop or up toward the row of trees that bordered the upper fields.
We procrastinated filling the chip box until the
very last slivers of wood were left in the bottom corners of the box. Then Dad
got after us and sent us out – day or night – to get the job done. I remember
it always seemed to be snowing and blowing icy wind every time we filled the
box. We thought we might freeze to death picking around for those dumb chips of
wood.
We filled the wheelbarrow twice or three times
before the chip box was full. As we picked up chips, I tried to imagine Laura
Ingalls Wilder on the prairie gathering dried buffalo chips and convinced
myself that my lot wasn't so bad.
Often for Christmas Grandma Young would make little
fire-starters out of old egg cartons, dryer lint, and wax and give them to Mom
and Dad (Grandma’s gifts were always practical). They burned for a long time,
and with one of Grandma’s fire-starters, only a few chips were needed to get a
good blaze going. That meant the chip box stayed full longer, and we went out
to pick chips less often.
The
Wash House
The wash house was situated directly behind our
house, a few steps on the sidewalk away from the back porch. It was painted
white with a green tin roof, like our house. Mom planted tall blue flowers
along the front of the wash house, and grass filled the area between it and the
house.
Out the side of the wash house there was a pipe
(perpendicular to the outside wall) about two feet long. It jutted through the
wall of the wash house and drained water from the washing machine. Water ran out of the pipe when Mom did her
laundry, and the suds built up into mountains of bubbly foam behind the peony
bush. I remember Mom always telling the babies to keep out of the bubbles.
Dan played Annie Over with me over the wash house. I
never got the ball completely over the roof, but Dan always handed it to me,
ran to the back of the wash house and waited patiently until I called him for
help. Then he ran back around, took the ball, and showed me how to hurl it over
the roof. Next he ran back to his side and threw the ball over again so I could
try once more.
Inside the wash house was the well. It was big and
black and tube-shaped. On the front was a small gauge (I’m not sure what for)
and a thick pipe that ran down through the concrete floor and into the ground.
Shelves lined the walls alongside the well and held odds and ends. Mom’s trunk
of dolls was there – the ones she played with as a little girl. Dad’s plastic
flamenco-dancing doll he brought back from his mission in Spain was there too.
On the opposite side of the well was the freezer and
washing machine. The dryer sat against the wall a few steps away from the
washer. With seven children, Mom spent a lot of time doing laundry. She taught
Ashley and me how to sort, spot clean, and wash clothes standing next to the
well in the wash house.
It was common for our pipes to freeze in the
wintertime, keeping water from entering the well or the house. When this
happened, Dad or one of our uncles would try and defrost the frozen pipes using
various (occasionally hazardous) methods. In the fall of 1997, just before
Thanksgiving, the pipes froze again.
To thaw the pipes, Dad and my uncles used heat from
a blow torch. They crawled under the wash house and went to work. Soon enough,
we had water and went about our day. Then suddenly someone realized the wash
house was ablaze. Mom ran to the bathroom and filled a 5-gallon bucket with
water. Then she grabbed the garden hose to try and douse the flames. It was too
late. The pump inside the burning building failed and the water stopped.
I felt desperate. I asked Dad why he didn't try to
save anything inside the wash house. He said it was too dangerous to go near
the flames. The fire department from Austin came long after the fire started.
They didn't help any. The hoses on their truck failed. The volunteer firemen
from Kingston put the fire out, but it was too late. The wash house was gone,
along with Mom’s dolls, our washer and dryer, our freezer, and our Thanksgiving
turkey.
A few days later a woman named Vicky who owned a
motel and restaurant in Austin came to the house with bags and bags of food,
saying she heard that our Thanksgiving dinner had burned up, and she wanted to
replace it. Mom cried.
The well’s pump still worked, so Dad built a small
cover for it. Now, from the big remodeled kitchen window, you can see past
where the wash house used to stand for miles and miles, all the way to the
mountains.
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