The Little House in the Suburbs

The wonders of modern life, our electronic technology, maybe the idea of civilization, can sometimes seem like a thin, tenuous thing. Sometimes it takes only weather to brush it away, take us back a couple of centuries. At times like that, heat can seem an urgent thing, so critical, moment-to-moment, that it’s hard to think about anything else. It never seemed so precious than one unusual weekend in March when I was at home with my wife and kids in my modern house, snug in our modern neighborhood.

We greeted the weatherman’s chance of snow with something like relief. My kids, 7 and 2, had hardly seen a real snow, and seemed skeptical about Daddy’s stories that indeed snow used to happen, even in Knoxville. We sent the kids to bed that Friday evening with the television on in our cheerfully lit house. Maybe snow tomorrow, kids. Oh, Daddy. They’d heard it before.

We knew this one was unusual when the noise of it woke us. Snow is supposed to be quiet, to bring a hush. This one roared in with muffled thunder, and, then, a crash. A large hackberry tree fell in the backyard. Sleep comes hard when you’re nervous. Maybe just to keep myself busy, I brought in some wood and built a fire.

Our house was built in the ‘40s, the very end of the spell when a living-room fireplace came standard in domestic architecture. Most houses in our neighborhood were modern ranchers built in the ‘50s and had no fireplaces at all. Our fireplace was so small it was hardly more than ornamental, like a phony shutter, or simply vestigial, an evolutionary leftover from the pre-electric days when fires were essential. The hearth was hardly more than a foot deep. It would hold only a very small, silly fire, and even then one had to build it just right or smoke would come in the room. Sometimes, feeling droll on a Christmas Eve, I’d build a little fire big enough to roast a handful of chestnuts. Some winters would pass without one. But at four o’clock in the morning, the last time I knew for sure what time it was, it seemed like a good idea.

My wife was in the back bedroom looking out the window. I heard her scream, then I heard a crash, and the lights went out. A huge tree, partner of the one that had fallen earlier, was on our roof, smashed into the attic, weighing so heavily on the back of the house we couldn’t open the back door.

We had gas heat, but the furnace depended on an electric fan. The house got cold fast. For the next three days, we would own nothing as important as that fireplace.

Morning brought light and the realization that two feet of snow had fallen. The neighborhood seemed dead. I wondered if everyone had somehow left. But then my friend Jonathan Tuttle came by to share the wonder of this strange weekend. Curious, we ventured out and shoved ourselves down to the river. There the snow lay more than waist deep. We could swim in it and of course did.

That was the fun part. As night fell again, we worried, especially about our little Rebecca, two years old plus change and small for her age, and the Tuttles’ kid, a newborn baby.

We nailed blankets over the doors and windows to keep the one room warm; the rest of the house was cold and dark. Often, when the power’s out, we worry about opening the refrigerator door, losing the cold and letting the food spoil. It wasn’t a concern that weekend. The kitchen was colder than any refrigerator. The living room, with its little fireplace, became a sort of survival capsule, a little cabin in the dark woods.

The Tuttles, from Florida and unused to snow, lived in one of the many modern postwar houses with no fireplace. They did have some food, though, more than we did—some chicken and potatoes. We had a can of lima beans and some onions. We just chopped it all together with some oil and put it in a steel pan and put the pan in the fire, right on the logs, handling it with an oven mitt. Nothing ever tasted better.

Some other neighbors, refugees from modern houses without fireplaces, saw the glow, and came by. In our tiny fireplace we cooked an unplanned meal for a dozen. It seemed a miracle of Biblical proportions.

We all slept in the living room, in front of that silly little fireplace. Small as it was, it made the room the warmest room we knew about.

Memory plays tricks, doesn’t it? The fact is, I remember the Blizzard of ’93 fondly, with something like warmth.