Today’s blockbuster prompt is from Davmoo: “Please write 100 words on …your favorite childhood memory.”
The wood stove in our living room was surrounded by pieces of slate. Old radiators kept the corners of the other rooms warm, but the wood stove, the old general, boomed forth waves of heat well into winter nights. Cats curled up to it as close as they dared. My parents each tended the fire in such an unassuming way while working on their other projects, another grownup ability that I found quietly glamorous. During nights spent around the stove, I would write and draw on the slate pieces with chalk while the three of us listened to albums of classical music. To this day, whenever I hear Satie’s Gymnopédies, I feel safe.
[Want to help me bust through my writer's block this month? Read about this exercise!]
4 Comments
Wow, what an evocative piece of writing! For a moment there I was back in the kitchen at my grandparents’ old house. Cold winter mornings, toasting bread over the old stove, or warming my toes after a long walk out past the farm…
Lovely work there, keep it up!
Funny and ironic you should pick a “heating in winter” type story. Even though they’ve both been dead for 30 years or more and its been just as long since I’ve been in their house, I can still remember the way their house smelled on a cold winter day, and for that reason to this day I have a preference for forced-air natural gas furnaces like they had.
Thank you for the kind words!
Memory is amazing, isn’t it?
It continues to surprise me just how much I remember from childhood when I think I don’t.