From the Relief Society Magazine, May 1966 –

The Old Stove

Lael J. Littke

Is that all there is to it? thought Martha, gazing at the papers spread in front of her on the kitchen table. You put your signature on a few official-looking documents, and then the land you’d lived on and worked and loved for so many years was no longer yours. By a few scribbles of a pen she had transferred to someone else a house, most of which they had built themselves, a house in which they had brought up the family, a house whose every corner was full of memories.

“I believe I understand everything now, Bert,” she said to the man who stood by the table. Her voice was calm in spite of the thoughts which tore at her heart. “The lawyer explained everything pretty well the other day when we signed these papers.”

Bert Randall nodded. “I guess that’s all then, Mrs. Nelson. Those are your papers. I’ve got mine at home.” Bert looked around Martha’s big kitchen, bare now except for the table at which she sat, four chairs, her sewing machine in its place by the big windows, and the old black coal range.

“Dorothy and I are going to enjoy this place, Mrs. Nelson,” he said. “Seems as if we’ve been crammed into little places ever since we were married. And the kids will love the farm.”

“I’m sure they will.” Martha wished he would go. She didn’t want to think about someone else living in her home.

Bert glanced once more around the room. “This kitchen seems so homey,” he said. “Guess it’s the old stove there.”

Martha said nothing.

Bert shuffled his feet. “I’d better get along. Best of everything to you, Mrs. Nelson. Must be hard to sell your place.” He went out, and the kitchen door squeaked shut behind him.

I’ve got to oil that hinge again, thought Martha automatically. Then she remembered that she wouldn’t be around to hear it squeak any more. The farm was sold. Sold. What a hard, chilly word. How could it be sold, something that seemed so much a part of herself? How could you sell the view of the mountains? What was the value of the gullies where her boys had pursued imaginary Indians, or the apple tree under which her daughters had tended their families of dolls? What price would you place on the forty-three years of toil and hope and tears and happiness she and Jim had put into the land?

Her thoughts were interrupted by commotion on the stairs.

“Be careful,” she heard Rick caution. “This old bureau has been safe up there for at least half a century. Let’s not ruin it now.”

She heard Jeff laugh. “It’s my leg that’s about to be ruined,” he said. “It may not be as old as this bureau, but I’m quite attached to it.”

Both of her sons laughed, then resumed their hazardous trip down the stairs. Soon they appeared at the bottom, their faces red and perspiring as they carried the unwieldy bureau, which had been part of Martha’s first bedroom set, out to the waiting truck.

“They sure built things solid in the early days. Mother,” Jeff puffed.

Beth and Laura came downstairs carrying boxes loaded with dolls and other childhood treasures.

“My younger children will have a regular celebration when I bring these things home,” said Laura. “Even the older ones may be interested. They have all loved to play with these things when they visited Grandma.”

Beth put down her box and pulled out a doll with an old-fashioned, brightly painted china face and stiffly neat hair.

“I don’t think I’ll give Flora to my girls,” she said. “I think I’ll save her for my grandchildren.”

Martha smiled, remembering Beth as a romantic-minded little girl whose dearest possession had been Flora, the doll which her own grandmother had given her.

“I’d better stop being lazy and come up and help,” Martha said.

Laura shook her head. “You stay here. Mother. We have to get everything all sorted and just have to carry it down. Then there is this kitchen stuff and we’re all finished.”

Martha dutifully sat down. As a matter of fact, she was tired. For the past two days she and her sons and daughters had been cleaning out closets and sorting through the collected treasures of forty-three years. Today they had brought the truck to carry away what couldn’t be hauled in their cars. Today was the last day on the old place.

She was glad that her children could come to help. They had arranged to leave their jobs and their families for a few days and gather for the last time at the old house to help her move. Martha knew she couldn’t have faced it alone, either the physical labor or the emotional strain. It didn’t seem to bother her children. They seemed so cheerful, as if this were some sort of lark. They had laughed their way through old school papers and pictures and had unemotionally discarded mementos of their childhoods. But then they were grown people now. Jeff was an engineer and Rick a journalist.

Beth and Laura were both married to successful businessmen. They all had homes and families of their own and didn’t need their old things.

Martha looked around her sunny kitchen. The windows were bare without the bright geraniums which had always bloomed there. They were now in the city, crowded onto the sill of the small kitchen windows of her new little apartment, all jammed together where they didn’t fit, just as she soon would be also transplanted to a strange place.

Her glance continued around the room, lingering on the dear old treadle-type sewing machine which had stitched patches on so many overalls and marched along countless yards of material transforming it into dresses, or quilt tops, or rag rugs. She almost dreaded to look at the old cookstove because of the rush of memories it would bring and the thoughts of leaving it behind, for it was too big and ungainly to move. Besides, she wouldn’t need it in the all-electric kitchen of her new apartment.

The old stove had stood there in the kitchen for all of Martha’s married life, not a sleek, lovely appliance like the modem stoves, but a looming, big, black, friendly monster, with warming ovens rising above its cooking surface, and a reservoir for heating water appended to its side, an essentially unattractive object, yet beautiful in its utility. It had six lids, and numerous little doors tucked here and there for the removal of ashes and soot. There were levers to adjust the draft and a small slot in its side for poking up the coals. The capacious oven had turned out countless meals, and the oven door had often served as a place on which to sit to warm oneself.

Bert Randall said it was the stove which made the kitchen look homey, and he was right. Just as the big comfortable kitchen was the heart of the house, so the old stove was the heart of the kitchen. Around it the family had gathered after evening chores were done and supper over to listen to the radio, or just to talk. She could almost see Jim sitting there as he had done so many years ago, holding a child on his lap while he read to the whole family.

Where had the years gone? It seemed such a short time since she and Jim, newly married, had started building this house. Now Jim was gone, and the house, and farm, and the stove were being left behind. It was so hard without Jim. But then, in a way, she was glad he had been the first to go. Why, what would he have done without her to trim his hair and cook his meals and tell him not to work so hard?

Martha wiped a hint of moisture from her eyes and gazed again at the old stove. Hirschvogel, the children had named it after Jim had read them the fairytale about the old Nurnberg Stove. Old Hirschvogel. It had been the first thing she and Jim purchased after their marriage. They had never had much besides the bare necessities, but they had gone ahead and been happy and reared a family with what they had. They had filled their children full of love and homemade bread and sent them out to face the big world. These farm-bred, mountain children had met the challenges and had made places for themselves in the outside world, but they always returned whenever they could, to sit by the old stove and talk of their adventures.

Fragments of a phrase from an old radio program came to Martha’s mind. Something about a stage on which were played a thousand dramas daily. “Grand Central Station,” she recalled. Well, there had been a good many family dramas enacted right there in the kitchen in front of the old stove. It was by the stove’s warm side she and Jim had sat through the long night after the telegram came saying Jeff was wounded in a battle halfway around the world. And it was around the stove that the family gathered the day he returned, pale and weak after several months in the hospital, but oh, so very much alive. Laura’s first baby had his first bath in a pan on the kitchen table close to the warmth of the stove, just as his mother before had been bathed. It was by the old stove that Beth sat the night before her wedding and spoke reminiscently of her childhood on the farm, of her love for her horses, for the chuckling creek, for the meadows and mountains. She had lingered there, softly closing the door on her girlhood, and then the next morning had stood in the same spot, radiant and happy, speaking only of her love for her Bob.

Rick had leaned against the old stove, troubled and uncertain, on the day he had decided to risk the operation which would improve his vision or make him forever sightless. It was one of the first things he had looked at when he returned home after a successful operation.

The stove was just too much a part of her life. It wasn’t a thing she could part with any more than she could uproot and tear out all her memories of the past. She was going to take old black Hirschvogel with her! Perhaps she could crowd it into the tiny kitchen of the city apartment. She didn’t think there was a chimney to which to connect it, but at least it would be there. Or perhaps Jeff would store it in his garage. She didn’t know what Jeff and the others would say. Certainly they would try to talk her out of it. How could they be expected to understand why an aging woman wanted an old black monstrosity of a stove? There was no place in their busy lives and shining modern homes for an old relic like that. But she was going to take it with her somehow.

It wasn’t only the big things she remembered about the stove — it was the little things, too. Such as the way it made the kitchen feel on a brisk autumn morning. Or how the children popped corn on it, pushing the old mesh popper back and forth and then laughing when the com exploded inside. Who could count the baby chicks who lived through the first precarious days of their lives in a box by the warm stove? Then there was the dog, Old Sport, and the way he used to sneak into the house in the winter and slide across the floor on his belly to hide behind the stove, craftily believing he had escaped detection.

Martha’s thoughts were interrupted by the tramping of feet on the stairs.

“That’s everything upstairs, Mother,” Laura said, as she and the others appeared, each loaded with boxes.

“We’ll be back in a jiffy and get this kitchen stuff,” said Rick, “then we’ll be off for the city.”

As they trooped out, Martha wondered how she should tell them about the stove. The best way was just to state she was taking it and then stand firm against their arguments to the contrary, just as she had had to stand firm when they were children.

She watched as they returned and carried out the table, chairs, and sewing machine. Then they stood by the side of the truck talking — probably giving her a chance to say goodbye to the empty house.

She went to stand in front of the stove when she saw them coming into the house. It would give her strength to stand by her old friend.

Her four children filed back into the kitchen and stood in a line in front of her. As she looked at them Martha was reminded of the children they once had been, and the way they used to come and line up like that when they needed her to help solve some problem.

Laura cleared her throat. “Mother,” she said, “you’ll probably think we are out of our minds.”

The others grinned sheepishly.

“Mother,” Laura continued, “It’s like this. We all want Old Hirschvogel.”

They wanted the old stove!

Before Laura could go on, Beth spoke up. “It seems so much a part of our childhood that we can’t leave it. I could probably find a place for it in my family room. Then my children could pop com on it, and I could read to them by it as you used to do.”

But it wouldn’t mean the same to them as it does to you, Martha wanted to say. They haven’t grown up with it. They have their own memories.

“I could use it in my basement,” Laura said. “I’d have to take off the reservoir and also the warming oven, but I would surely like to have it.”

Take off the reservoir and the warming oven? It wouldn’t be the same stove without them.

It was Jeff’s turn to speak. “I’d even be willing to store it in my garage, just to keep it in the family.”

“Or maybe you’d like to have it in your apartment,” Rick said. “We could probably figure out some way to connect it to a chimney.”

Martha looked at her children. How could she have thought moving out of the old home was just a lark to them? They were adults now, but their world had begun here within these walls, and it was as if that particular part of the world was ending when they had to remove a whole lifetime of possessions from the house. They were clinging to the old stove as an anchor to the past just as she was.

She smiled at them, lined up there in front of her. Funny. She had never noticed before how the last vestiges of childhood clung to them, apparent in the vulnerable curve of Jeff’s cheek, in the springiness of Laura^s still pretty black hair, the wonder in Beth’s blue eyes, and in Rick’s angel-imp grin. It was almost as if they were children again, asking for her guidance through a problem.

Martha’s eyes misted over for a moment and then her vision cleared. They weren’t children any longer, any more than she was the young wife and mother who had reigned over this particular little domain for so long.

“No,” she said briskly, “the stove belongs here with the house. It has a job to do helping to bring up another family. We’ll take it along, all right, but only in memories, just as we’ll take along your father, the house, the apple tree, the mountains, and the good times we had here together. Just as I’ll take along the little children who once lived here. That old stove wouldn’t be the same anywhere else. It would just sit around decaying, reminding us of how it used to be. We’re going to live in the present, and we’re going to let Old Hirschvogel do the same.”

The four people before her looked at her silently for a moment, then they smiled.

“You’re right. Mother,” Jeff said. He patted the door of the warming oven. “You know, I envy those Randall kids, growing up here.”

Each one of them rubbed some part of the old stove before going out. Martha was the last to leave.

“Goodbye,” she whispered. She looked all around the empty, yet memory-filled room and let her gaze linger for just a moment on the old stove. “Goodbye, Hirschvogel.” She turned and walked rapidly through the door, closing it squeakily behind her.

“You noisy old hinge,” she said under her breath. “That’s no way to welcome a new family.”

She snatched an oil can from a box of things she was leaving for Bert Randall, and oiled the complaining hinge.

“There,” she said, opening and closing the now silent door. Then she walked down the path to where her children waited for her.

“Let’s go,” she said. “The lady who lives in the apartment next to mine said the other day that I should come and have dinner with her when I got back, and I don’t want to be too late.”