I woke up because my toes were numb. Instinctively, I reached for Heidi, my eyes still closed, my mind still on sleep. I felt for her two-foot frame and found it, half in and half out of the covers, and pulled. Her shoulders were ice. I prodded my husband, who was nestled in and around the only blanket.

“We need a fire,” I told him. I could feel the steam coming from my mouth as I spoke. He didn’t wake up.

As I sidled around him to get out of bed, shivering and cursing, I swore I couldn’t take it anymore. We weren’t camping. We weren’t even outside. This was just a typical winter’s morning in our rural Kentucky home. If I was lucky the old wood and coal stove would still have some embers floating atop the ashes. It then became only a matter of stirring some air through the stove to create fuel for the fire that remained. On a bad night there was nothing left but a smidge of warmth and a nose full of dust.

Before entering the steamy, fume-saturated air of Eastern Kentucky, I'd never heard of a wood stove. That changed the first winter after I got married, when my mother-in-law asked if we’d cleaned the flue in preparation for the first big cold spell. Accustomed to warm gas heat, at first I found the heat from the wood and coal stove wonderful. On cold nights, Gene would stoke the fire up so hot that the stove would turn red, I’d peel off my sweater and jeans and jump into shorts and a t-shirt and stand in front of the window to cool off. It was a great feeling. But it didn’t last, and slowly, deliberately, the shorts would be traded for sweat pants, the t-shirt for a sweatshirt, and I’d be shoving more wood in the stove in the hopes of retrieving that Florida environment.

Gene doesn’t keep a great fire. He can blame some of it on the cracks scattered along the top of the house, more of it on the places in between the wall the front door where we had to replace the door mom and dad decided to use on their trailer. But, it doesn’t change the fact that he just does not have the country touch. He’s a city kid born into a country body, I tend to think. He would rather have a desk job than to work outside, and he’d rather cuddle in the electric blanket than have to chop a block of coal.  

My husband isn’t the onlycountry boy turned executive. The world is changing too fast around them for the hillbillies to remain sheltered in their ’hollers’, surrounded by family and tradition. Technology has taken over and, as a result, the essence of rural existence--to grow up fast, strict and pure--is being overtaken by the need to expand. There are some, like my brother-in-law, who try their best to hold onto the existence country folk around here have known for two hundred years. He works the same job his father works, plants his crops religiously in the spring, treats his kids like miniature adults. His children, though, are well-behaved and quiet.

My nephew, at barely one-and-a-half, stands silently next to his mother, a picture of lovely serenity on his face as if, in his short life, he’d already found the meaning of life. I guess the word I’d use to describe him to strangers would be ‘over-mature.’ He doesn’t run around and climb everything in sight and get into everything he's not allowed into, like the typical toddler, my own being a perfect example. Though the babies are only three months apart, there seems a much wider gap. While Heidi is climbing onto the couch, the highchair, the table and two chairs at once, CJ remains behind, sitting alongside his sister with a  smirk on his face.  

CJ’s parents claim that this level of maturity is a good thing. Not only did they refuse to give him a pacifier as an infant, they also refused him the bottle, the bibs, the highchair, the sippy cups, and every other instrument that makes infancy fun. His first day home they fed him table food. I keep expecting to go for a visit and find him eating steak with a knife and fork.

The positives of growing up fast: CJ will know how to safely shoot a gun by the time he’s eight, and he’ll always be the hard worker, the conformist, the one happy after a long day’s work. On the negative side, he’ll start smoking or chewing before he's ten, and dad’s liquor cabinet will be raided in between chores.  He’ll probably be a farmer, a laborer, or disabled by the time he’s eighteen, the three largest professions in these parts, though in today’s economy most find farming too difficult and try instead to be one of the lucky folks getting unemployment or SSI.       

The country will always be the country. There will always be people who work as farmers (the world wouldn’t survive without them), boxed houses that are made of rough lumber , and people who think tradition is more important than money. But we’ve moved on, my husband and me, dragging Heidi behind us kicking and screaming. We left the smothering air and the even more enveloping way of life. The country life is a good one, if you’re suited for it. It is full of people who are family-oriented, laid back and animated. But like the wood and coal stoves that heat the little boxed houses made of rough lumber, the country appeal only lasts so long before you’re shoving more and more into the fire, and getting nothing back but a smidge of warmth and a nose full of dust.

Author's Biography

I am a twenty-seven year-old wife and mother living in Columbus, Ohio. This essay reflects the time I spent in rural Kentucky.

E-mail Jennifer at mu-meson@rocketmail.com

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