My mother grew up with a wood-burning stove in the kitchen of a house without running water or electricity. The stove is now part of a collection at Andersons Rock Creek Relics on old U.S. Highway 61, where she can see and touch it every September during the annual threshing and sawing show founded by her big brother and his wife, Duane and Judy Anderson, and their amazing family.
Uncle Duane knew trees and lumber from all his years in the woods and at the sawmill. He’s the one who visited the 1902 Marty barn with my dad and me to verify its woody origins. Aunt Judy knew the human heart and had an eye for rural beauty.
Duane and Judy both left this world in 2019, but their spirits live on. They understood the love of fine old machines, from my grampa’s sawmill to tractors to threshing machines to kitchen stoves. When my own 1940s kitchen stove bit the dust a few years ago, I thought they might have room for it, but there was already a gas stove something like it in their kitchen collection.
Of course, I loved my old stove so much I had to write about it—I had to understand why. My search took me from the stove to gas, electricity, and wood, and to fire in particular.
“Fire is the ultra-living element,” wrote the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in 1964. Maybe that’s why we say we carry a torch for someone. Love is like fire burning in our hearts.
This fall, I got the news that my essay “Now You’re Cooking With Gas” won a prize from the North American Review, the oldest literary magazine in the nation. It was published in the fall issue and came in the mail the night before Thanksgiving at a moment when I was acutely missing my old friend the stove. I felt I’d finally done right by that stove.
As poetry would have it, the award is called the Torch Prize for Creative Nonfiction. It’s named after a wonderful writer and high school teacher, the late Rafael Torch, and it evokes the stove and the fire in my heart, too.
In a craft reflection for the review’s Open Space online, I dedicated my essay to the memory of Uncle Duane and Aunt Judy, who’ve joined that great cloud of witnesses, lighting our path. We carry a torch for them.
Until the fall issue of North American Review is posted online, to order a copy, contact the managing editor at [email protected]. Mention the friends-and-family discount code "contrib3014."