The New Wood Range

Years before when we had appliances at the Mrs. P.Y. Waters Grocery we had sold several Wood Ranges to customers, but as more and more customers got electricity they purchased electric ranges and used the old wood ranges for storage or put them out in the yard to cook outdoors.

We had a customer who lived way out in the country and she would come to town once a month pulling her little red wagon bring fresh eggs and butter and quilts and jams and jellies to swap for things that she needed at home.

She would always stop by the store and pay on her bill before going home. Dad would let her store anything perishable in a refrigerator that we stored cold soft drinks in until she was ready to go home.

This one day when she came in she said she needed to purchase a new wood range as hers had rusted out and she couldn't store hot water in in anymore. Dad got out an Atlanta Stove Works Catalog and let her browse through it until she found what she wanted. He told her that he would pick it up on the following Tuesday and we would deliver it to her on the Wednesday following.

Wednesday morning we went to unload it from the truck that he had gone to Atlanta in onto a pickup truck. It was so heavy that it took four of us to move it from one truck to the other. We decided that we would wait to assemble it when we got to her house and we could carry it in easier.

We got to her house and I got to see the first bottle tree that I had ever seen. As she would pull her wagon back home she would pick up colored beer and wine bottles that were thrown out on the side of the road and take them home in her wagon. She would take the bottles and put them over the end of the small branches in her trees and as the sun would shine through the trees the bottles would gleam and glisten in the sun. She also took the bottles and used them at the edges of her walkway to her front door. She would dig a trench and put the necks of the bottles in the ground and use the bottoms lined in a row on the edges of the walk way.

She had plastic flowers hanging all along her fence in the front of her house and in her shrubs. She said that all of the graveyards that she would pass on her walk home would throw out the old arrangements and she would get them to use in her yard. "She was being green long before we ever knew what being green meant."

We went into her kitchen and moved out her old wood range and set it out in her barn for her. We assembled the new wood range and carried it into her kitchen. The new wood range was much heavier than her older one and as we set it into place on the floor the floor sagged under the weight. We had to make a trip into town to get some cement block to put under the floor to support the weight of the range. We finally were able to get it leveled and the floor supported for her.

She fed us some homemade coconut cake and some peach tea for all of our effort and let us know that now she could finally take her a warm bath because she had her hot water tank (that didn't leak), on her new stove.

As it only holds about five gallons of water hot as the stove cooks we knew that she would have a little wait before she was ready for that warm bath.