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Our Old House
By Abraham Lincoln
The house was old when we moved in. I should say it was old when my dad
bought it and got the deed after paying $300.00 in past due taxes. The
Shepard family had to move out before dad and mom moved in. It was the
house I was born in.
Windows rattled when the wind blew. Fine dust particles sifted through
cracks and settled on the windowsill. In the winter, fine snow would
end up on my quilt and ridges lined old wooden sill in need of paint.
More than one time I woke up in the morning to find my down-filled
comforter was white with snow.
Our toilet was outside. It was hot and filled with spiders in the
summer and in the winter it was cold. The toilet inside was a
galvanized white, with red trim, pot that was used by everyone for
number one or number two. People used it to keep from going outside at
night.
The contents of the pot upstairs would freeze solid and mother would
carry it downstairs and set it beside the kitchen stove to thaw so she
could dump it outside in the toilet.
Houses, like our house, were not insulated and the only thing that
separated us from the outside cold or heat was the thin clapboard
siding and plastered walls. People called the space between the plaster
and the clapboard, dead air space; and they seemed to agree it was an
insulating factor.
When the wind blew hard like it would in the winter the air leaked in
around the edges of the house and across the floor of the kitchen. You
could see the linoleum rise and fall like waves in the ocean.
Mother had a large, cast iron, kitchen cook stove with some baked
enameled doors trimmed in bright chrome. The stove was used to
keep water warm in the reservoir and the teakettle hot.
There was another stove in our living room. It kept that room warm.
Both stoves used coal, and corncobs were used with wood kindling to
start fires in them.
We had a small soup can sitting on the floor under the kitchen stove
and mother kept coal oil in that and one or two corn cobs were left to
soak and those burned a long time after setting them on fire and would
soon set lumps of coal on fire.
We did not have a thermostat on any wall. We measured how hot the
cookstove was by feeling the heat coming off of it when it was burning.
In the summer the coal stove was replaced by a coal-oil stove on the
back porch. That was used to heat up a teakettle to make coffee and fry
an egg or two for our breakfast.
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