Before The War On Coal

I cleaned off our answering machine today, a major accomplshment. We still have a wired line but don’t answer it much. The messages were stockpiled and the earliest were from my parents, both calling near the end of their lives for help. I recorded them on to my iPad in GarageBand and saved them as an mp3. They are heartbreaking but hard to let go of.

I am happy to see Steve Hoy saw my last post. He says he doesn’t remember writing it and that is why I save this stuff.

I found this old check in a box. I only kept a few checks, like the one I wrote to Swing-In Pizza for $3.98. Steve and I rented a whole house in Bloomington for $85 a month. It had a coal burning furnace and we had to clean the ashes out and put them in metal ash can outside. (My father always called our garage cans “ash cans” and I always thought that was odd since we never put any ashes in there.) As the winter wore on in Bloomington we got too lazy to take the ashes out so we’d pile them up on the concrete basement floor. I went down there one night to feed the fire and it wasn’t quite dark so the lights were off. I noticed the four foot high pile was glowing red hot.

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