My best friend's family home burned to the ground Sunday, and I'm heartbroken.
When I was a child, I was so afraid that our house was going to catch on fire that there were nights I couldn't sleep. I remember once when I was an older kid - 8th grade'ish, because we'd already moved to the farm - I lied to Mom and Dad about a nightmare, because I'd started thinking about fire after I went to bed and needed to be comforted. They did, because that's what they do.
Our bedrooms had electric wall-heaters, and during cold weather, Dad cautioned us on the daily about not leaving anything in front of our heaters. We'd say, "OK," and he'd expound by telling us how quickly the wall could catch on fire. Cynthia and I slept in a room with a window that opened onto the front porch. If we'd needed to get out or needed rescue, we were right there, and I don't remember either one of us leaving anything in front of the heater during any kind of weather, because that territory and all the territory around it was strictly off limits.
When I bought this house in 1993, it had baseboard heaters and a wood stove. I burned wood when I could, but working 12 hour night shifts in the ER made burning wood for a primary heating source impossible, so I used the baseboard heaters a lot to keep myself comfortable during my work stretches. When I was off, I mostly stayed home and built warm, roaring fires.
My first winter here, an ice storm took out the phone and electric lines, and single-digit temperatures made a fire necessary. The dog, Tess, and I snuggled on a pallet in the floor by the fire and near the sliding glass door, where daytime light is nice that time of year, for the better part of three days. I boiled ramen noodles and had fun making snow on the deck with the pot water. I baked a potato.
One of those nights Tess barked, and I woke to see a section of the flue glowing red like horseshoes in a blacksmith's fire. I knocked the stove's vents shut with the poker and waited for the damper handle to turn black again before using pliers to ease it around a few notches.
After that, using the baseboard heaters didn't seem nearly so dangerous as they did before, and to my credit, even if the rest of the house looked like a rathole, I kept the area around the baseboard heaters swept free of pet hair and dust bunnies.
When Jack and I opted to make this our permanent home, one of his first orders of business was disconnecting the heaters from the great room and moving them to pre-scrapyard staging under the deck with the old waterheater
Twenty years later when Jack and I bought that new stove I blogged about here, we had to retrofit everything from the stove up, which included taking off the old chimney and re-doing that part of the roof before cutting a new hole and installing a new flue all the way up from the stove. We don't have a chimney now. We have a pipe with a peaked topper that looks like a little round birdhouse or something in a cartoon.
The guy who supervised the whole operation told us that it was a wonder the place hadn't burned to the ground as much as we'd used the old stove. The original flue wasn't rated as flue pipe at all. It was surplus mobile home ducting that had been powdercoated. It wasn't even the right diameter to mate-up with modern chimney flues. The stove itself was literally a fire-trap and so heavy we nearly killed ourselves getting it loaded up for the trip to the scrapyard, which was, incidentally, the same trip with the baseboard heaters and old waterheater from under the deck.
We still have a couple of baseboard heaters - one in each bedroom - but we never use them anymore.
Last night, after learning that the fire which destroyed a family home - a Tennessee Century Farm farmhouse - and everything but my friend's 90'something year-old daddy started with a baseboard heater, Jack noted that we need to go ahead and get those last two pulled out and hauled off.
Dad still checks to make sure we haven't started using them again and remind us to keep the cat hair and dust bunnies swept out of the way.
I do. Believe me, I do.
