No one cuts firewood in the dog days of summer – no one except those folks who cook their daily meals with it.
Because my Grandma Daly was one of those people, cutting “cook wood” is one of my fondest childhood memories. Born in 1885, Grandma never became accustomed to cooking with a gas or electric stove. Though more modern appliances were available when I frequented her kitchen in the 1950s, Grandma never abandoned her familiar wood cookstove.
In fact, she had an old gas stove in one corner of the kitchen, but I never saw her use it. The tea kettle she always had warming for my orange pekoe tea and the cast iron skillet she used to fry my hamburgers were permanent fixtures on her cast iron cook stove, and the coals in its firebox ever ready to be stoked and fed more wood.
As I recall, it was not an ornate, enameled model, but an ordinary cast iron workhorse – possibly the same one she started with in the house she and Grandpa moved into in north Springfield around 1908.
For most of her long life Grandma needed no help splitting her own wood. She had Grandpa (a sign painter by trade) and until the advent of World War II she had two boys at home or living nearby.
By the middle of the century, though, Grandma’s best wood-splitting days were behind her. But, at about that same time, my folks bought 39 acres in Dallas County with an abundance of persimmon trees. Thus, at the same time as we were clearing brush and cutting firewood for our house, we began cutting small persimmon trees into short “cookwood” pieces for Grandma.
With few spindly persimmon trees bigger around than a coffee cup, we attacked them with our blue bow saws and regularly accumulated enough to fill the trunk of our 1956 Mercury sedan.
Persimmon was perfect for our aging grandma to handle. We cut the stove wood to the exact length for her firebox, and most pieces were smooth and still covered with bark. Maybe we sent her a few split pieces, but larger logs generally went in our woodpile for the house.
It seems such a small thing, in retrospect, but those trunk loads of gray-barked persimmon sticks were a lifesaver for Grandma, as well as a joy for we boys to provide.
Though a brief chapter in my farmboy youth, those “cookwood days” are among my most treasured childhood memories.
A former feature writer for Ozarks Farm and Neighbor, Jim Hamilton is a retired newspaper editor/publisher. Hamilton was reared on a small dairy farm in Dallas County, Mo. Contact Jim at [email protected].
