My house is heated by a wood stove and nothing else. Contemplate that, push button people. No electricity? So what? Next time you’re sitting there shivering in a power outage, wishing you had a nice hot toddy or ten, think of me cozy and warm, reading in a candle lit room. Heck, with an eight hour battery life on my laptop, I can even watch movies while eating popcorn popped on the gas stove.
A plus side to a house heated with wood is that if the party is lame, you can use the ‘gotta get home before the fire goes out’ excuse. Down side? If the party is awesome, gotta get home before the fire goes out. Or gotta sit up for an hour wasted off your head to get it reestablished. Still, there’s something about wood heat that you don’t get from any other modern heating source, other than the tropics. Maybe it’s something primordial, that “I have FIRE!” feeling.
When I first saw this place three years ago, I was hunting for a winter rental, having learned my lesson regarding living on a sailboat in New England in winter. The moment I saw the cottage, I knew I was home. Despite being well into the academic year, the house hadn’t been rented because your average garden variety college student can’t manage to put down the beer long enough to start a fire or keep it going. Also, the landlords lived next door, which made those nightly wild parties difficult.
Upon discovering that I couldn’t afford both house rent and winter boat storage, I got an idea and went to the rental agent. “Say again?” she asked. “Can I bring my 36 foot sailboat as well as my two Jack Russell Terriers?” As she wrote that down and said “I’ll ask,” I realized that NO one in their right mind was going to rent to me. While calculating just how much alcohol I’d have to buy to stay oblivious through another heinous winter frozen aboard the boat, the agent called. “Yeah that’s fine, when do you want to come sign the lease?” Really? What’s wrong with these people? Turns out that the kids were pestering for a dog. Having me next door meant having all the fun playing with mine and none of the poop to pick up. And they claimed that seeing the boat in the yard cheered them because they could pretend it was theirs without actually having any boat maintenance woes.
It was a bizarre twist of fate that I ended up back in this same cottage this winter, and hence plopped on quite a different course than I had picked out. Last summer, my former landlord and I ended up on the same ferry, not having seen each other since I had moved out of the cottage, back onto the boat, and had sailed off into the sunset. He said they’d had terrible tenants, and that it was even harder to rent the place now because of all the construction on the new addition. I told him I was fleeing to Florida the second it got cold. Next thing I knew, the rental agent was calling to make me a tremendous deal that was cheaper than living in a car. And I was still welcome despite no longer having dogs or a sailboat.
When I was driving back from my incarceration, uh, vacation in FL last month, so deathly ill I could barely drive, facing coming back to a freezing cold house was not curative. I called my landlords and said, I’m sorry to bug you, but I’m dying. Would it be too much to ask you to light a fire for me so I can just come in the door and fall down?
When I arrived home, not only was my house toasty warm, but they had taken advantage of the time I was away to fix a few things around the place, sweep the chimney clean, AND, she left me a pot of chicken soup, a basket of fruit, healing tea bags, and a box of tissues so I’d get better faster! And he continued to come over and plow me out after each of the 437 snowstorms we’ve had so far this winter.
How many people can say their landlords are awesome?
