This post is contributed by Barnaby Porter from his archives. Read the previous post here.
A friend from the past, Helen, decided to spend the winter alone in an old farmhouse. It was a long winter that year, with deep snow, sparkling days and moaning nights. She was in need of solitude, had things to think about and writing to do, and the farmhouse needed a caretaker to keep the place warm. It could have been, too, that certain farmhouse spirits were in need of company, which would have given meaning to the hex sign on the barn door.
I dropped by one bright day – no warning, just a visit. I climbed up over the drift swollen front yard and knocked on the door. A lone, naked maple threw a shadow against the side of the house, and a cat posed inside on the windowsill, meowing silently at me.
Helen let me in. We sat in the kitchen and talked about friends, our current pursuits, and we probably had tea. I don’t recall much of what we talked about, except that she introduced me to her friend, Pearl. Pearl was not the cat. Pearl was the cast iron cook stove just near us at the table, the warm heart of the kitchen, the soul of the place.
Helen, in her solitude, had become very intimate with that hot, black, iron presence through a long string of days and weeks of good-smelling breakfasts, wind-driven snow and many, many dark starry nights, when frequent visits to the door to humor the cat had sent her quickly back to her warm chair by the stove and the table.
It was there at that table, I’m sure, where she became aware of the spirits at her back. This curly old cast-iron thing with its warming shelf and the thermometer in the oven door, with its towel-drying rack and spring-handled plate lifter, with its orange glowing air slots and shiny, blue steel stovepipe – this elaborate, ornate, cantankerous warm presence, trimmed with chrome, had become Helen’s source of sustaining comfort through her long, long nights with pen in hand.
And that experience does something to a person beyond simply basking in the stove’s radiant heat. There grows a certain kinship with the unseen fire within . . . and the spirits. They laugh, and tiny pieces of firelight leak through the cracks in the top plates to dance softly on the ceiling. Creaking and groaning, the spirits lend familiar and soothing sounds to the cadence of a ticking clock, even winning a little tune from the tea kettle. And the spirits breathe, sometimes little breaths, sometimes long sighs that waft up through the brickwork into the wintry night.
Helen talked at some length about Pearl. It became apparent to me that she was not so alone as I might have thought. There was life in that winter kitchen, and friendly spirits, which, though they devoured a good many armloads of split wood, managed rather well to warm that weathered old house, to cook all the meals, to dry the laundry, even to kettle a whole winter’s worth of tea.
I finally got up to leave. Saying goodbye at the door, I glanced back inside. With her cat crouched contentedly under that old cookstove, lapping at a bowl of milk, it seemed Helen’s winter in the company of cast-iron spirits, while providing her the solitude she sought to do her thinking and writing, was not such a lonely affair.
Artist and author Barnaby Porter has had a varied career in marine research, aquaculture, and woodworking, among others. Most recently he partnered with his wife Susan as co-owners of the Maine Coast Book Shop & Cafe in downtown Damariscotta. In October 2021, Barnaby completed his tenure on Coastal Rivers’ Board of Trustees after six years of service.
