Love and Lamplight, by Helen Bay Gibbons

Wedding Photo of Earl and Iola Bay

The first thing I remember in my life was sitting with my little sister on Mama's lap as she fed us fresh bread and milk. The soft light of a small coal-oil lamp cast flickering shadows as fire in the kitchen stove snapped and crackled and gave off the pleasant aroma of juniper smoke. I felt safe and comfortable within my baby world of home and family.

That dimly remembered scene of love and lamplight is a perfect symbol of my happy childhood, sheltered by the enthusiastic affection of my young parents. That warm circle of love also included three living grandparents and an exuberant throng of aunts and uncles and cousins on both sides of our large extended family.  

Even now, when I catch a fragrant whiff of a wood-burning stove, I am carried back in memory to that tiny home in the peaceful Mormon village where I was born, to a kitchen that smelled of homemade bread and beans slow-cooking on the stove.

Mama mixed love with cooking skills, feeding souls as well as bodies.  She blended faith and affection into her pies and cookies made "from scratch." I remember her fresh garden vegetables seasoned with home-churned butter, and savory stews simmering on the stove beneath a delicate overlay of good wood smoke to enhance the flavors of happiness.

Daddy fueled that happiness by his own hard labors, searching the hills for dead wood suitable for household stoves, finding and loading logs onto a horse-drawn wagon to be hauled home to our backyard woodpile.  His love and labor sustained us all--Mama and me and my seven younger brothers and sisters.  The smell of a wood fire reminds me of my parents and our happy home. 

Romantic memory makes the modern gas furnace and microwave oven seem cold and sterile compared to a glowing wood fire.   Memory sheds a rosy light over life "in the olden days" when wood was the universal fuel.  However charming the memory, it overlooks the dirty, disagreeable tasks connected with wood-burning stoves.   

Every family in my hometown had to find and haul one or more large stacks of dry logs home from the hills every year. Every day, summer and winter, somebody in every family had to chop wood and carry it indoors. Every day, somebody had to remove ashes from all the stoves.  Meanwhile, traces of soot and smoke escaped from stoves and settled on curtains, walls and furniture, while ugly, black stovepipes poked through ceilings and roofs. Midwinter nights in Junction's high altitude, as fires burned low or went out, houses turned ice-cold.  So in the frigid early dawn, someone had to leave a warm bed to rebuild the fire and remove the chill.   

I'm not the least bit inclined to go back to the old-fashioned ways of heating and cooking that polluted the air and denuded the forests. But still, on occasion, when I catch a whiff of wood smoke in the air, I remember the pleasant days of childhood. 

Source: Helen Bay Gibbons, The Way of Happiness, Book 1