Dallas, your story reminded me of winter on our Kansas farm. Our house was built in 1911, and back then they didn't put insulation in houses--at least not ours. Of course, there wasn't central heating either, and our whole house was heated with one coal stove. When we didn't have coal, we burned corn cobs. We not only had frost on our car windows, we had it on the inside of the house windows, too.
Needless to say, during the winter we pretty much lived in that room with the stove! I remember that when it was bedtime, we would heat an extra pillow by holding it up against the stove and then run upstairs as fast as we could, and put that warm pillow on our feet. We always kept warm, because we had lots of quilts piled on top of us (I still prefer sleeping in a cold room with lots of covers).
We didn't have electricity, either. I remember doing everything by the light of a kerosene lamp. I don't think I could function now without electric lights. In 1951, when our baby sister, Eunice, was born, we finally got indoor plumbing and electricity; but we still had just that one potbellied stove for heating. Our dad put a heat register in the ceiling above the stove that let heat into one upstairs bedroom, and it kept that room pretty cozy in the winter. It also let the sound come up from the room below, and I remember my dad playing the fiddle while I was going to sleep. But that's another story............
--Leone (Gregory) Carlson
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