Before stepping away from my garden, home, and precious puppies for 10 days, I had some expectations for when I returned. I expected that my garden would be fruitful, my home would need a cleaning, and my puppies would be filled with seperation anxiety. So what happened? My home was spotless (thanks to my mother giving me the royal treatment), my dogs now have seperation anxiety for my mother (thanks to her giving them the royal treatment), and my garden is now absent of all of my cucumber plants, my tomatoes are splitting, and my corn looks like it was run over by the lawn mower. My blossoming rose bush has been completlely eaten by some bug, who has only left the stems, to remind me of where a rose bush once stood.
There are some things in my life that I appreciate now, more than when I had them. My dad's coal stove is one such thing : As a teenager, it used to bother me to go to my father's house in the country on the weekends (RD#3 Dalton, PA--just 1 mile from Lake Winola, 1.5 miles past the Baylor Ice Co., on the corner of Freeman Rd and Purdy Rd, right next door to the one-room-schoolhouse and cornfield). As much as I loved spending time with my sister and him, it seemed so far removed from everything. I never even told my friends that we had a coal stove. My father, son of Al Leggat from A. Leggat & Co. Heating and Cooling, to this day, knows more about green energy than Al Gore. When my father bought our house in Dalton, he installed a beautiful coal stove in the basement, which he ran every winter using Pennsylvania anthracite coal. Besides heating the house, the coal stove served many useful purposes. I loved it when my father would fill a metal pot with water, and p...
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