When I was growing up my parents wanted two things for our house: to keep it warm and to keep it nice.

My father was mostly in charge of keeping it warm. The only source of heat was a Moloch-style wood stove that crouched in the basement and sent its warmth up through a metal grate in the living room floor. During the winter, my mother and we three girls would sit on this grate with various pillows and blankets, reading our books or knitting or whatever. Daddy would get mad at this scene because he thought that it meant he wasn’t keeping the place warm enough. He would go stomping down the basement stairs, and add more wood, and employ the poker in a serious attempt to get us to move. We would move temporarily, but as soon as the temperature went back even a little bit south of the “hellfire” setting, we would sneak back on.

Of course it wasn’t Daddy’s fault, but upstairs was very cold in the winter, and the hardwood floors felt like sheets of ice to our bare feet. The bathroom, with its linoleum floor, was colder still. My parents put an old-fashioned kerosene-burning stove in there, which could be lit any time somebody wanted to take a bath. To light this contraption, you had to unlatch the top section and tip it to one side. Then you turned a little crank to raise the wick and held a match to the wick until it caught. Then, and most importantly, you carefully lowered the top section, because if you didn’t latch it down fully the stove would smoke as only a kerosene heater can.

So, the bathroom had the capacity for warmth.

Now, as to keeping things nice. My mother sewed some gauzy white curtains that she installed in this same bathroom. One day she arduously washed (in her wringer-model machine), starched, dried outside on the clothesline, and ironed these beautiful curtains, and hung them back up in the bathroom. Somebody, who will remain nameless for the duration of this narrative, came in after her and started the oil stove, forgetting to check that the latch was fully re-engaged. This person closed the bathroom door and went away to allow time for things to warm up.

Cue my poor mother: she opened the door to the bathroom some time later and was met at the door with a great roiling mass of greasy black smoke. Her precious curtains were only dimly visible. She stood still for a moment, and then slammed the door and marched off, down the stairs and out onto the back porch, making an odd hitching sound that was somewhere between a sob and a snarl.

My father watched her go. Then he turned to us girls, who had gathered uncertainly on the other side of the upstairs hall, and shook his head mournfully.

“Everybody lay low,” he said. “Your mother’s in a rage.”