Almost exactly 52 years ago – maybe even to the day – Wally and I stepped back in time. With our newly-purchased, vintage, cast iron Glenwood cookstove set up in the kitchen we started a fire on a chilly morning. All these years later – roughly 12,480 mornings later – I’m still tending the fire in that stove.

I grew up in a weather-tight, centrally-heated house that required nothing of my mother except to bump up the thermostat in the morning.

He lived with his grandparents until he was five or so, outside of Augusta, on the Old Belgrade Road, with a wood cookstove and an outhouse.

So, while this drafty old farmhouse wasn’t such a monumental step back for him – sentiment may have figured in – for me it was rebellion.

Heating with wood, growing our food, living in what was then a tiny town (population of Lincolnville in 1970 was 935) on a sometimes nearly impassable road (Sleepy Hollow was a daunting slog after a snowstorm) was about as far from my childhood home as I could get.

And that was the point. Everyday life was harder than it had to be. For some perverse reason this suited my personality just fine. Though we two never consciously set out to find a harder way – we never thought of ourselves as back-to-the-landers – in fact we both thrived on all the work we made for ourselves.

With discouraging predictability, the sink drain froze every winter. Equally predictable, though scarier, were the chimney fires in those early years. We lost count.

There’s an art to wood-burning. You learn to smell the creosote building up, to notice crackling in the pipe followed by the jet engine sound of the chimney taking off. Eventually, and before we burned the house down, we got smart, and stopped trying to burn green wood.

With no woodlot of our own, we bought wood every year in four-foot lengths. He sawed it up, chopped it, and stacked it. Carried it in all winter by the armful. If he could count his life in cords of wood handled, I can count mine in fires built, tended, worried over.

And now, the first few days of October, wood-burning season has started. For many years we had four stoves (five counting the one in the little front room where we hung our stockings; we only lit it on Christmas morning), but then over the years we pared down, putting a gas Rinnai in the shop and an oil furnace in the cellar.

Two stoves now heat the ell; this is a classic “big house little house back house barn” deal with the kitchen and living room in the littlehouse/backhouse or ell. Have you seen the book by that title? It’s a wonderful exploration of the unique Maine and New Hampshire connected farm buildings.

The ell is typically not as well built as the main house. Ours has a crawl space under part of it, accessible by four removable floor boards, and under the kitchen there’s just about a foot down to the soil it was built on.

Doug Green, our Camden realtor, warned us against buying the house – “uneven floors, cracked plaster, etc., etc.” – all true, especially of the ell. Of course, when Wally heard about the trout brook out back, and we watched owner Nat Stone feeding chickadees on his hand we’d have bought it no matter how bad the plaster was. And the leaky windows.

So what if it takes two stoves to heat it, even now 52 years later. No regrets. We found the Glenwood in Belfast that first summer, complete with brand new, unused wood grates. The stove had oil (kerosene) burners installed in the fire box, an upgrade from wood at the time. A cardboard box with the grates also had the invoice for the stove; it was dated 1918.

In pristine condition, probably due to never having burned wood, its chrome was shiny, and the fire box clean, not scorched by a wood fire. And it was gray enamel, not black.

Apparently, stoves were sometimes enameled. A friend in Camden had a bright royal blue cookstove, the only one I’ve ever seen.

After the first ten years or so our once unsullied Glenwood was already showing wear. The chrome was flaky off (just a coating apparently) and the enamel was starting to craze. One summer we sent her off to Thorndike to the Bryant’s Stove Works for a refurbishing – sandblasting off the enamel and recoating the chrome.

I have no idea how we got it out of here. Cookstoves weigh between 400-600 pounds, according to Google, and supposedly three strong men can move one. As an aged woman I’m too weak to open a bag of chips without my teeth so it’s hard to imagine how we moved stuff around all those years ago. I think we sent it to Bryant’s twice, the last time to have them straighten out the warped top. These stoves aren’t indestructible.

But even as people get attached to a favorite vehicle – an awesome diesel truck they can no longer drive or an antique Farmall tractor that lacks the safety features of a modern one – I love my old Glenwood. Building a fire first thing in the morning, once October settles in, is second nature, like brushing teeth.

Crumple up a few sheets of the Bangor Daily News, add a folded-up pizza box or a crushed wine box or a couple of cereal/cracker boxes, next a handful of kindling (dry bark that’s fallen off in the woodshed or scraps left over from some wood project) on top of that, and strike a match.

Once that’s blazing, followed by the WHOOSH up the chimney, it’s time to add a piece or two of split firewood, shut the damper, open the oven door to let the heat out, and pour a cup of tea.

Firewood that’s nice and dry from the neatly stacked rows in our woodshed. Wood handled these days, not by Wally, my lifetime partner in this venture, but by a couple of generations of our offspring. I’m pretty sure he’d approve.

Town

Property taxes are due this week, paid in full or half now, half in April.

LHS

The community is invited to come to an Open House Saturday, October 15, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. to see the work that’s been done so far on the old Beach schoolhouse. From the outside it still looks about the same, but walk inside and see the difference!

Condolences

Sympathy to the family of longtime resident Ken Boody who passed away last week.