I LIVE WITH A COOKSTOVE AND LOVE IT

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Later, Bonnie told me the boy had asked her if that was a wood cookstove her mother was using and when she sadly confessed that it was, he beamed. "Really? Gee, I hope you'll ask me to eat sometimes. The food's great cooked on one. My granny had a wood stove until last year."

Bonnie said the young fellow even mentioned that he thought her mother was "cool". I like that boy.

A BIGGER STOVE . . . AND A BETTER LIFE

Henry Thoreau, God rest his soul, knew his stuff when he said, "Simplify, simplify". This—for at least nine months of each year—we have literally done. We now have two homes: One in the thick of the "rat race" in Louisiana where everyone's in a mad dash, racial tension is thick and trust for each other is a thing long gone. The other, a little four room "unmodern" house we rent for twenty bucks a month, is in the heart of the beautiful Ozark Mountains.

Here, in our second domicile, I wash our clothes on a rubboard outside next to nature; I carry our wood and water inside; we have no telephone, television nor neighbors for a mile in any direction. Daily, we walk a mile up the mountain and a mile back for our mail. The local people are slow to anger, slow to criticize and quick to help. The school at the foot of the mountains is unsophisticated and undemanding in every way.

We live in our retreat house nine months of the year. Then we're forced back to that "other way" to earn enough to live our simple and quiet life here in the hills.

We have only the barest furniture necessities and every item in our mountain house is "useful". To quote Thoreau again, "Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life are . . . positive hindrances." Amen!

We considered ourselves lucky as all get out when we found a beautifully cared for Home Comfort woodburning cookstove for our retreat. It is truly an antique, but sturdy as the mountains surrounding our house. The white on the stove still gleams except where pots have been scraped back and forth over the years.

I wouldn't take ten times the price we paid for the range nor 50 times that much for the friendship we made with its sellers, two lovely little ladies in their seventies who care tenderly for each other. They used the stove for 50 years before selling it.

This range is much bigger than the one I have in Louisiana and I could cook for a battalion of men on it. The food warmers on top are large enough to hold a full meal with the doors closed. The giant oven will cook six loaves of bread at once and the copper-lined water reservoir heats fifteen gallons so hot I have to cool it to do dishes.

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