The Farmstead Rooms We Only Heated

Our house was a patchwork of eras: stone basement, hand-hewn beams, odd little rooms built onto other rooms as if each generation had added a secret without telling the next. In winter, whole sections were cut off with blankets or plastic sheeting to keep heat where bodies lived.

We didn’t say “energy efficiency.” We didn’t say “poverty.” We said, “Close that door, we’re not heating the whole house.”

My dad hauled wood, split it, stacked it, fed it into the stove like a sacrificial ritual. He fixed everything himself: plumbing, wiring, engines, things no longer made because the companies that built them were long gone. I watched him resurrect machines like a rural necromancer.

Back then, I thought: This is just what dads do.

Now I think: He did these things because no one else was going to save us.

And yet — I wouldn’t trade that old house for anything. I didn’t understand its worth until adulthood: the creak of stairs older than the Civil War, the warm pockets of air around the stove, the sovereignty of my father’s hands, the entire ethic of making-do and making-things-last that still lives in me like a bone memory.