The house on the acreage had been built around 1900. It had high ceilings, lovely woodwork, diagonal hardwood floors, transoms above the doors of interior rooms, and windows that opened from both top and bottom for “airing.” Closets were small, hallways were wide, indoor plumbing had been added sometime later with pipes left exposed, and the basement was dank and creepy.
A huge, coal-burning furnace squatted in the biggest room of the basement, it’s round arms stretching in all directions to provide heat to the downstairs rooms and up through the walls to the upstairs bedrooms. There was a large, dirty coal room fed through a chute on the west side of the house, an outdoor stairway with the typical slanted door, and an indoor stairway accessible through an odd little room located at the end of the hallway, linking all the upstairs rooms and stairs to the second floor. Only about six feet square, the room was mostly doors (four, and one window) and had room for only a telephone mounted on the wall and a small table.
Going to the basement by the indoor stairs was scary. The stairs were narrow and steep and there was only one small window to provide dim light through its perennially dirty glass. One hurried past the groaning, huffing furnace to get to the brighter room where the washing machine and rinse tubs were kept. On laundry day, the outside cellar door would be left open for light and easy access to the outdoor clothesline. To one side (what would have been the area under the kitchen) were rows of wooden shelves holding dozens of quart and pint jars of canned fruits and vegetables; the results of the hard work Mother put in every summer and fall, with help from us girls, to be sure there would be plenty of canned tomatoes, beans, sweetcorn, peas, peaches, pears, apples, grape juice, many kinds of jelly and jam, and several varieties of pickles to last until the next season.
Nearly every afternoon, Mother would send me to the basement to fetch a few jars of canned goods from the shelves in the laundry room. A quart jar of tomato juice for the chili she was making for supper, canned apples for the dessert of apple crisp, a new jar of jelly for our breakfast toast tomorrow. Making my way up the narrow stairs clutching three or four heavy, slippery jars of food made me nervous. What if I should drop them? After all that hard work picking and shelling peas, fighting off flies while we cut sweet corn off the cobs, back-breaking hours in the strawberry patch. It wasn’t just Mother’s hard work, my sisters and I’d put in a lot of effort to stock those basement shelves, too.
We were thrilled the next spring when Dad announced that we were going to Oskaloosa to the Sears & Roebuck store to look at freezers. It would be an important purchase, a family affair. We should all go. The salesman explained about the importance of flash freezing before transferring packages to the main freezer storage and the necessity to use the proper packaging. It sounded complicated and I began to wonder if we really needed a freezer after all. But Mother seemed to think she could handle the new methods, especially with the detailed instruction manual and free recipe book that came with the freezer. But where would we put the freezer? It was huge; bigger than a refrigerator lying on its back. In the basement, Dad said, right next to the wooden shelves. He’d already measured; it would fit. That seemed to cinch the deal, we would get the big freezer. And there was a huge advantage; we could have ice cream available all the time, an impossibility with our outdated refrigerator. Mother gathered up brochures about freezing different kinds and amounts of food and made sure she would be able to get a ready supply of the recommended bags and boxes for packaging.
“It’ll pay for itself after the first three years,” the salesman assured Dad. “Yeah, but you want the money right now, don’t you?” he replied. The salesman didn’t laugh at Dad’s attempt at humor. He started to explain the store’s finance arrangements, but Dad could pay the whole cost now. Dad didn’t believe in spending money he didn’t have.
A lesson that has served me well for a lifetime.