Memories of Americana

By Donna Hruska

Listen to Donna narrate this story!

Not long ago I walked into a friend’s quite elegant early American house. There, by the authentic aged brick fireplace stood an old black coal bucket, filled with newspapers to be used as tinder for starting fires. I gazed at that coal bucket and immediately thought of tangerines.

When I was a little girl growing up in a small town we only had tangerines at Christmas time. We ate them over the coal bucket behind the dining room stove where the pungent peelings fell in great orange drops on the black coal.

I can still feel the heat of the stove burning my front side while my back froze as we stood behind the stove winter mornings struggling out of our Sears Roebuck blue footed pajamas. For a long time when I was little, getting dressed for little girls meant struggling into a harness made of wide elastic that went over the shoulders, around the waist and down to end in garters to hold up our long white stockings. On those cold mornings it took uncommonly long to get into those contraptions.

The coal bucket served as waste basket for the whole family. If we wanted to cut paper dolls, we did it over the coal bucket. Candy and gum wrappers, apple cores, anything burnable, went into the coal bucket. And always, it was the place to keep warm.

When I was twelve years old, I had quite another experience with a coal bucket. By this time we had moved to another town. Our new house was modern, with running water and central heating. The coal bucket was banished to the basement where it was used to fill the furnace—a great round fire box that consumed coal in huge quantities but kept us warm on both sides at once.

My father soon wearied of trying to satisfy the monsters appetite a bucket full at a time. One day some men arrived to install a stoker. I remember it as gleaming red and sticking out far into the furnace room so that we had to walk around it to get to the basement door. The details of its workings are lost to me now. I only remember that it occasionally turned itself on to convey coal from the hopper at one end into the furnace at the other. My father was quite impressed with it, although I failed to see what he was so excited about; that is—until I fractured my elbow.

That fracture was a near thing, having just missed giving me a stiff joint for the rest of my life. It required a full cast that kept my arm bent at a 90° angle for six weeks.

When the cast finally came off my arm was wasted and stiff. “It will straighten out,” the doctor assured us. “Let her carry something heavy every day—like a coal bucket.” My father was more than happy to oblige.

Every morning and every afternoon I reluctantly climbed down the basement steps, forced myself into the dank black coal bin to shovel coal into the bucket. Picking it up with my crooked arm, I stepped over the high threshold into the furnace room, twirled around twice for extra pull on the joint and dumped my load into the stoker. It seemed to take a lot of buckets to fill that hopper, although probably not as many as I remember. I know that it was dark and lonely down there and I swung the bucket vigorously hoping my arm would hurry and straighten. It did eventually, of course, although I was never completely rid of the coal carrying job until I went away to college.

Memory—it’s a strange and wonderful thing. A whiff of tangerines and I’m again behind the stove spitting seeds into the coal bucket. An ache in the elbow when I set my hair and once again my nostrils twitch with the unique odor of the coal bin. Perhaps that is why antiques and early Americana are so popular. I’m looking for an old coal bucket myself.

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