The Fireplace And The Basement

Next to the kitchen, around the fireplace is where many gather for the warmth and coziness of family and friends. Our fireplace at Grandma's was a hub. It provided several things that have added to the sweet memories of my childhood.
We had a ritual at our house. Bath time was every Saturday night, in keeping with being clean and ready for church the next morning. We always got bubbles, the water was not too terribly high but there was plenty for playing with the boats Dad had made for us at Christmas time; of course there were some of the store-bought kind but the best ones were the ones from Dad.
After we played and scrubbed and got our hair washed, we were wrapped in huge towels and hurried to, you guessed it - the fireplace. Here we toasted our little selves til our skin glowed pink and ready for getting dressed into our pajamas.
Sometimes having the fire going meant we could pop popcorn over the open flame. Grandma had a popper that was a sort of box made of metal mesh. It had a long handle and the lid could slide up and down the handle, opening so that kernels could be added, then closed for the popping, and then opened again to remove the yummy corn. We were allowed to help but we had to be careful not to get the popper in the fire because our treat would be burned, and we also had to make sure we didn't get too close!

Downstairs was a place of wonder and mystery. We weren't supposed to go down there to play. There was a table saw and stacks and stacks of cut logs stored, piled all the way to the ceiling in places, for the purpose of keeping that fireplace usable in the winter. There were also tools and nails and materials rather unfamiliar to kids. There were no real windows to speak of, and the light had a long chain which was too high for us to reach so it was dark, in spite of the light over the stairs, even during the day.
With kids, rules are always such a temptation to break and because our curiosity was more than we could sometimes bear, we would, on occasion, venture into forbidden places down there in the dark. I don't know what we expected to find, but we were usually disappointed in how ordinary it became on closer inspection. But twice, not once but twice I paid a price for my precocious ventures. I went downstairs with no shoes on (another broken rule), and I stepped on a very long nail that went pretty deep. And then another time, we were climbing on the outside of the stair railing and I fell into the large sink we called "the washtub", onto my head. Very painful. (Could these doings be part of the reason my Grandma called me a "little pill"? Hmmmmmm.)