By Wendy Bauder
Someday I’m going to write instruction manuals for the population of intelligent people in the world. I used to shake my head at things like the tag on my hair dryer that says “Do Not Use in Swimming Pool.” Are there really that many idiots out there? Then we installed a wood burning stove and I found out.
Lesson one: Wood stoves are wonderful on the pocketbook but “shocking” to the senses; there isn’t an automatic way to humidify the air. My family began getting tiny, electrical shocks from everything we touched. The kids didn’t want to move for fear of being zapped so I devised a plan. After my morning shower, I laid my wet washcloth on the stove to steam dry and replenish ambient moisture. The instant my washcloth touched the stove, I was blasted in the face by a cloud of steam. I grabbed up the simmering material, oblivious to the fact that terry cloth could reach temperatures that high. I lost a few finger prints before I released the hissing rag from my grasp where it bounced off the stove top and onto the tile. There it lay, popping and flaming. I gave it a good stomp and bent down for a closer examination. The tag was melted.
I left the washcloth on the tile to cool down when I spotted a white smear on the stove: the melted tag. In a moment of idiocy, I scratched the sticky stuff off with my fingernail. The good news is that I didn’t burn my finger. Dummy lesson two is that fingernails melt and stink much the same as nylon tags do.
Plan B for putting humidity into the air was a cast iron kettle of water on top of the wood stove. It worked beautifully; the water came to a rolling boil within several minutes. Just before bed, I filled the kettle to the top so I didn’t have to get up and refill it in the middle of the night. As I dropped off to sleep I was jolted awake by what I perceived, in my drowsy state, as the sound of machine gun fire. Dummy lesson three is that when drops of boiling water are disgorged through the spout of a kettle onto a searing wood stove, the sound will send anyone ducking for cover.
My husband experienced his own dummy lesson the first time he emptied smoldering ashes from our new stove. He approached the stove with a garden shovel and a shopping bag.
“Flammable,” I said. Moments later he returned with an empty paint can which he filled with ashes and hot coals. He cocked his head at me for effect, stood up and grabbed the handle. It took about 3 seconds for his brain to tell his hand to drop the can. Here’s the dummy lesson: Use a potholder because metal conducts heat.
One winter day a friend and I enjoyed coffee and cookies in front of my wood stove. “I should get a wood stove,” she sighed. “Then I can build cozy fires too.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Any dummy can do it.”
