Warm Mornings and Blessings My mother used to tell me stories about her childhood. They were mostly sad stories because she was a sad mother who used to be a sad little girl. She would tell me how poor they were in Arkansas, sharecroppers living in an old house with cracks in the floor and walls. She could see the chickens underneath the house through that floor and winter meant cold all the time. She was thankful for Warm Morning coal stoves because they kept coals alive all night. A fire didn’t have to be built in the frost of the cold morning; just shake the coals down, add more coal, and carry out the ashes. Ii could hear her doing that every morning. It filled me with guilt and selfish pleasure as I curled under my mountain of quilts. A good girl, as I well knew, would have spared her poor tired mother and prepared a warm morning for her once in a while. Mama had told me many times about the ways in which she had let her mother down. How her sister had taken advantage, crying to be carried when they walked the long miles home from a neighbor’s house. Good girls don’t take advantage of their mothers. Guilt shuffled down the hall toward me every morning. The cold penetrated our house even though we had no cracks in the floor. The linoleum floor was like worn, cracked ice. I heard her get up and wrap into her insufficient housecoat, now called a robe. I heard her footsteps down the hall and into the living room where her Warm Morning stood with a shade of warmth at its base. A handle stuck out the front. When pushed back and forth, it squealed metal on metal and dropped the ashes down. That sound is still guilt scraping my bones – ungrateful lazy girl to lie in the warmth of your protected body and let your poor sad mother suffer in the cold. But I always lay there anyway. She would pour more coal from the bucket into the top of the stove and then shovel the ashes out into the bucket. Metal on metal with ash grit. Bad girl, lazy girl, selfish girl, warm loved girl. And the stove would get warm. And she would come to me gently, “Hon, time to get up.” Time to moan and complain and play the game with my little sister. Neither of us wanted to be the first one up. We tried to outlast the other while Mama called us the second time. I usually won because she was younger and more afraid of getting in trouble and also because I would put my bra and socks on the bed at night and slip them on while still under the covers. She hated that but she was too young for a bra. She hated that, too. Once up and dressed, we ran to the stove to warm first our fronts and then our backs, then a quick run to the freezing bathroom in the back of the house. Then to the kitchen where Mama had the hot oven door open to warm us. By this time, she had breakfast on the table. We sat and argued with each other and complained about having to eat. Having warmed our bones, bellies and tempers we made our beds and went fussing out into the cold for school. I never said, “Thank you, Mama”. Not for the gentle love or the warm kitchen or for the banking of the home fires that brought me through those cold winters. What I considered wretched, she considered good fortune: no cracks in the floor or walls, sheet plastic to cover the windows, and a good Warm Morning stove. Combine that with a coal seller who gives credit and count your blessings. Now my mother has a furnace and a thermostat, and warm cuddly robe and carpets. She spends the winters in Florida and shakes down ashes no more. I count her as my blessing as I turn off my electric blanket and rise to slip frozen waffles into the toaster.
Posted on: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 21:46:09 +0000
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