The realtor placed two sheets of paper on the table in front of Arnie and me. He explained, “I’m going to take you to see these two houses this afternoon. Before we leave the office, you might want to look at the spec sheets. You’ll notice both houses are in the countryside, and both have the number of bedrooms, bathrooms and the backyard you want.”  

Each sheet bore the picture of a house for sale. Below the picture was information about the house. One had fifteen hundred square feet of living space, the other had two thousand. One house had a new roof and with the other a new water heater. The yearly property taxes listed for either property made my eyes water.  

Both houses looked nice, but I had trouble taking my eyes off the brick house. It looked inviting, warm, and friendly. My gut feeling was that it looked like a home…my home. When we toured it, Arnie and I liked what we saw, despite its many faults. The house was built over fifty years before I was born. Some remodeling had been done, some of it very poorly. It was branded with the colors and products of the 1970’s mobile home industry. Most shocking to me, was that the house had two furnaces! One was an oil furnace, and the other was a wood furnace.

My husband saw this as an advantageous bonus, because our home purchase took place in 1979. Oil production in the Middle East dropped that year due to a revolution in Iran. The drastically rising cost of oil and its increasing shortages had homeowners turning down thermostats and switching to burning wood if they could.

Arnie was the eldest of eleven children and had grown up in a farmhouse heated by a wood furnace. He didn’t see burning wood as a problem. My family had built a new farmhouse one year before I was born. So, I never experienced the wood cookstove in our old house’s kitchen, the wood burner in the center of the house during the winter and having to use an outhouse. Being the youngest of my family, I also never had to do heavy farm chores. In the farmhouse of my childhood, the oil-burning furnace was just a mysterious box connected to vents in the basement. We never touched it, and it quietly, effortlessly heated our house. Now, being faced with feeding wood to a furnace day and night all winter long, I felt intimidated.

Unfortunately for Arnie and me, the drop in oil production in 1979 triggered a worldwide economic recession. This made mortgage interest rates skyrocket. Our mortgage interest rate was 11 percent. I remember that only about nineteen dollars of our first house payment went toward the principle!

Shortly after we moved into the brick house, Arnie had to be away overnight. A few hours after he left on his trip, I put Niki, our toddler, to bed and went to the basement to stoke the furnace for the night. The bed of red-hot embers in the fire box was thin, so it took me a few minutes to throw in several chunks of wood. Just as I was about to shut and lock the furnace fire door, I heard a loud, ominous roar.

Having the furnace door open for so long allowed the greedy embers to quickly begin devouring the fresh fuel. The draft sucked tall flames into the chimney and lit built-up creosote on fire. Despite my lack of wood furnace experience, I knew this was a bad thing. I just wasn’t sure how much of a bad thing it was.

Running upstairs, I looked up the fire department’s phone number. I told the person who answered that I had a chimney fire and asked how serious that was. He said, “Very serious! We’ll be right there. What’s your address?”

I stuttered, “I-I don’t know! I’ve just moved here!” I had to put the phone down and run outside to read the house number so that I could tell the dispatcher where to go.

As firemen entered the house, Niki stood next to the door in her Dr. Denton pajamas, asking if they wanted beer or wine, a question Arnie and I always asked when family dropped over for a visit. The firemen laughed, but I felt embarrassed. Did they think Arnie and I were heavy drinkers?

The firemen said they could see I had a chimney fire when approaching the house. It was my understanding that they dropped a big chain down the chimney to dislodge the burning creosote. Fortunately, the chimney hadn’t cracked and set the entire house on fire.

I’d grown up on a farm, but I was only a quasi-country girl. Experiencing country life as an adult made my status as a country woman genuine. The brick house that I felt such an affinity for when I first saw it in 1979 is still my home. If there are any ghosts here, they know all my secrets and shortcomings, but love and accept me anyway.