House Warming

Our house had rubble walls covered with stucco and a clay tile roof. This is standard Spanish construction. For all I know, it may be standard European construction. The house didn’t even have a mud sill or any sign of a vapor barrier anywhere. As a result, during the winter months when it was cold and rainy, the house walls wicked up moisture the same way that a cloth strip wicks up kerosene in a lamp. It got colder than a teacher’s wit in our house.

Our only source of heat was a fireplace and we used it a lot. Most people who had fire places bought their firewood. The favored fuel was olive, dense, oily, wonderfully scented, expensive olive wood. We never felt good about burning olive wood. The expense bothered us a little bit, but the knowledge that we might be burning wood from a tree that was planted before Jesus was born bothered us a lot. We decided that we would burn trash wood that we could find in our neighborhood.

The neighbors thought we were crazy, but we persisted and over a year-and-a-half period we cleaned up our entire neighborhood. We couldn’t find a stick of junk wood anywhere. No broken chairs or picture frames or anything. So. Principles be darned, we bought a load of olive wood to see us through our final spring.

Some of the junk wood we harvested was very dirty, but we burned it anyway. Also we never cleaned the chimney, nor did we hire a chimney sweep.

One afternoon we were surprised to hear the sound of a rumbling freight train running through our back yard even though we had no tracks there. Joanne thought it was more like a jet engine, but we had no airport in the back yard either. What we had was a chimney fire.

There was very little about our house that was made of wood. Some of the doors and the dining room table just about exhausted the inventory. Our clay tile roof had wooden supports. Everything else was relatively fireproof.

The chimney was covered with brick and stucco with holes for the smoke to escape from four different directions. This time it was flame escaping, leaping out at least three feet, so we had a pyrotechnic display to go with our rumble and roar.

There was no way we could get close enough to the fire to deal with it. We did the only thing we could. We stood by and watched and felt thankful that our house was relatively fireproof.