From the managing editor, December 2012
In the seven years that my husband and I have been together, he has left me home alone only twice. I am typically the one who travels—most often for work—allowing him free reign to engage in home improvement projects, eat microwavable eggplant parmesan dinners, and drink beer while ironing his button-up shirts in front of a TV tuned in to “Top Gear” or “King of the Hill” reruns. He’s a complex kind of man.
The first time he left me home alone, one of our cats died. It was July, and Athena apparently ingested a lily, which is poisonous to cats. Trips to the emergency vet and our regular vet had proved to no avail, and I, living in a townhouse with neither a yard nor a shovel, was forced to store Athena’s body in a cardboard box on top of the air conditioning vent until my father could drive over the mountain and take her home to bury.A year later, we moved into a 1930 bungalow that afforded us more room and a yard for the hound we had adopted since Athena’s passing. The house was in good shape, owned by only three other families before us, the most recent of which had lived there for forty years. Granted, the house had its quirks. There was no shower, only a cast iron tub—a situation we told ourselves we would remedy within the first three months of living there, and a situation that proved to last more than two years. The yard bore not a stick of landscaping, which I set out to resolve with complete disregard for the summer’s sweltering heat and bone-dry drought conditions. We did not dig holes; we chipped away at baked red clay. The house’s windows were the original single pane glass in wooden frames that neither kept out the heat of that summer, nor insulated us from the cooling temperatures as the season turned to fall.
It was an early weekend in October when my husband left again, this time for a weekend of work training in Knoxville, Tenn. The cold snap was unexpected, and bundled up, I watched the mercury fall in the antique thermometer passed down from my husband’s grandfather. The problem was that in that first year of marriage, I had grown somewhat complacent in my attention to household infrastructure and equipment. Home alone in my 1930 house, I did not know how to turn on the heat.
A child of central heating and cooling, I recognized only modern thermostats. The round dial on the wall of the dining room perplexed me. More over there were things in the basement of which I knew nothing at all—a large blue box thing called a boiler and some affiliated black box with a red button that my husband had once explained to me, but at the time I had failed to pay attention. Stubborn in my refusal to admit my plight, I did the only thing I knew to do. I set the oven to self-clean. For four hours, the smell of burning leftovers filled the house, but by gosh, I wasn’t cold, and once the oven finished its searing cycle, I went to bed.
When the weather failed to improve on the second day, I knew I couldn’t—or shouldn’t—pull my self-cleaning oven trick again. The house was cold and the radiators in each room mocked me with their untapped usefulness. I knew I had to do the unspeakable. I knew I had to ask for instructions. I went to shuffle through the stack of files that the previous owners had bequeathed to us upon our purchase of the house, a stack of files that included receipts for window blinds and strange calculations to equate the depth of oil in the tank with the quantity that existed. Surely, given the wealth of information contained therein, there would be a name, a phone number, a person other than my husband who I could call to ask how to turn on the heat.
My efforts were rewarded with yellow carbon copy of a receipt from the boiler’s last servicing. Although it was a Saturday, I called the number listed. To my utter delight, someone answered, and that someone was another woman.
“Hi!” I gushed, immediately launching into an explanation of my situation—husband gone, old house, etcetera, etcetera. The woman on the other end of the line laughed. “Do you see a thermostat?” she asked. “Yeah,” I replied. “Turn it,” she said. And as the clear plastic circle with its tiny red hashmark rotated, a low rumble came from the boiler below. Sheepish, I thanked the woman for her help.
As the boiler did its boiler thing, the radiators clanked and popped to life, and a soft warmth emanated. It took no time at all for the entire house to become toasty enough to match the blush of my cheeks.
This issue of Smoky Mountain Living is dedicated to heat. We hope you enjoy reading it in the warmth of your own home.