My grandmother lived in a tiny, one-bedroom social housing apartment in Wiesbaden, Germany. Whenever I visited, I slept in the bedroom with Oma. The beds were arranged in an L, head to head, which made for good bedtime chats. In winter, it was cold in there. Frigid air seeped through the single pane windows, no matter how many draft stoppers Oma stuffed around their edges. The apartment’s only heating was an electric wall heater in the far off bathroom, which my dad had installed after overriding Oma’s objections (“It’s not worth it; I’m going to die soon anyway.”—She was about 65 at the time and lived to 83.) and the coal stove in the living room.
All through my childhood Oma had the same coal stove the apartment had been outfitted with when the building went up in 1952.
It was a slender thing, covered in shiny black ceramic plates that grew hot to the touch. The silvery stove pipe swung up to the low ceiling and became equally hot. Two doors on its front creaked open to the fire box: the top opening to check on the fire and dump in more coal if needed, the bottom to clean out its debris and build a new fire the next morning. The stove’s ceramic lid lifted to reveal a heating plate, where Oma sometimes parked a pot of goulash while we feasted at the adjacent dining table.
Since the bedroom door led into the living room, Oma could have left it open to warm up the bedroom. But why heat the bedroom where you slept under big fat down duvets? On winter mornings, I’d snuggle under my duvet for as long as possible to avoid dealing with the cold. I’d linger to hear the sounds of Oma preparing that day’s fire in the coal stove so that, once I’d sprinted across the arctic space between my bed and the door, the stove’s billowing warmth would welcome me in the living room.
The sound of Oma’s iron shovel scraping yesterday’s ash from the stove’s bottom grate was the telltale sign.
Usually Oma would wait to start the fire at a more reasonable morning hour, such as 8 a.m., rather than her 5 or 6 a.m. rising time, so as “not to wake the child.” She’d spend the clammy early morning in the kitchen, cooking and baking, with the gas oven providing some warmth. By the time I got up, bowls of glistening chocolate pudding would be sitting on the counter, and a sheet of yeasty plum cake might be cooling on the small table under the fogged-up kitchen window.
The scraping was an unpleasant, but promising sound. The crumpling of newspaper followed as Oma packed it onto the cleaned-off grate for the fire’s first layer. Then there’d sometimes be the din of the tin box that held the kindling, the fire’s second layer, when Oma set it down on the hearth, made of hammered sheet metal. Her aim, however, was to cause as little noise as possible. Next, I might hear an ambulance siren passing as Oma opened the door to the balcony, where she kept the coal buckets. The thud of the closing glass door would follow, and then came the most satisfying sound of all: the whooshing rumble of the balls of coal as Oma dumped them into the stove. Last, the striking of a match, and soon after, if it all worked out, the crackling of the fire would gain force.
That scratchy sound of Oma cleaning out the stove, of metal scraping on metal, is not something I’ve actively thought about or tried to conjure later in life.
I had not heard it in decades. These days, however, my husband and I have been spending more of our time, including in winter, at our country home in Indiana. There, we have a wood stove in the living room that we only fire up when temperatures dip below 0°F and the geothermal can’t keep up.
In that case, my early-rising husband has the fire going long before I get up. Our bedroom isn’t next to the living room for the fire prep noises to wake me. Recently, however, he was going to be traveling for a few days while artic air was coming our way, so he reminded me how to build and keep a fire going in our wood stove.
First, you clean out yesterday’s ash—and there it was, the sound of my childhood!
The scraping of metal on metal as I maneuvered the shovel over the stove’s iron grate and into the corners, ash dust floating about, my gloves getting sootier than they already were. As I lifted out shovel after shovel of ash, dropping it into the waiting bucket, I was smiling to myself. Even though I’d lived all my life with the modern day comfort of central heating, thanks to Oma the building of a fire in a stove was familiar to me.
Despite my dad’s badgering, Oma never upgraded the primitive heating method in her apartment. Thus, the scraping of metal on metal is such a familiar, comforting sound.