Our coal-burning furnace was a big one.  The furnace room in the basement was a closed off, unfinished portion of the basement, about 25 feet X 20 feet with dirt walls, the floor of the big farmhouse overhead, and entered through a big door from the finished portion of the basement, where all of the canning, freezer, cupboards, laundry and old wood stove things lived.

Walk with me straight into the furnace room and past the furnace — and a left turn has  us standing directly in front of it.  When Dad brought coal to the house from the mine south of the river, he would remove a small window just at ground level.  The coal would be shoveled off the truck, and then through that little opening into the basement where it would lay in a great heap between the furnace and the wall, waiting for its day to heat the house.

On a spring day when there was still quite a bit of coal left–enough to finish the season–Dad came and called to us to come to the basement because there was something he wanted to show us.

We all trooped to the furnace room where he was waiting and there, sitting on the blackest of coal chunks, was a huge moth.  It was about five inches long, resting with its wings extended.  In memory, I’m thinking the extended wingspread was about eight inches.  We know that both children’s perceptions and old people’s memories can exaggerate, so who knows…but it was a very, very large moth.  It was creamy white and quiet, just sitting there thinking moth thoughts.

I wouldn’t be able to tell you what became of it.  It was certainly not destroyed by us.  Dad may have just let it stay in the coal room until the weather warmed up.  It apparently had caught a ride with the coal from the coal mine.

The coal mine was a small one with carts that were pulled in and out of the tunnel by a single horse on a small scale track, not much larger than those the little trains at Knotts Berry Farm ran on in the 1950s.  The owner of the mine would walk into the shaft, stooping only slightly since it was a fairly high opening, and fill the little cars to bring them out one at a time to put on the truck of the customer.  The customer might lend a hand with loading coal both in the shaft and onto the truck since many hands make light work.  Then, coal loaded, they’d have a good cup of coffee before they parted company and each returned to the rest of their day’s work.

In the 1930s, when the depression and the drought made farming a nonprofit experience, my Dad traveled to North Dakota and worked in the coal mines there for a period of time to make enough cash to buy necessary household things.

It’s a short MBOB today. Perhaps next week, MBOBs will become a more measured process for me again.

Late Friday night, I finished the editing of the manuscript for MBOB, the book.  Three years ago when I started writing essays in a blog format, just for our sons, it felt good to finally be getting my teeth into a project I had anticipated for a long, long time. Eventually, I decided to open the blog to few online friends so that those who didn’t already know our family could read, and thus, my writing could have a more objective test.

The response from interested readers was a bit of a surprise to me.   It was flatout satisfying and fun to realize that they saw their own stories in my stories and were reminded of their own histories, etc.  I really liked that very much.  There have also been some who, having read the stories, have shared that their childhoods do not have pleasant memories or so many good stories, so their hearts are drawn to the word pictures for a different reason –memories can also be like a great big quilt that we share with one another.

As Americans, there’s a sense in which my story is our story.  More importantly, my stories remind you of your stories — and your stories are also “our stories.”

This is America’s story.  Of course MBOB is my part of the story, but it is always our story and because it is, it gives inspiration, comfort, and another evening around our campfire.  It gives us context and meaning, a place we can point to and say, “See?  That’s what I’m talking about!!”

Having the task and privilege of preparing something for MBOB readers here over the last couple of years has helped me in a variety of ways.  I’ve appreciated your kindness in receiving some of the reruns over the past several weeks and wanted to give you this update.  The other Admins and Sundance have been best encouragers to me from the beginning.

I’m just finishing my part of the work and the publisher’s editorial, design, and marketing peeps have not started theirs, so it will be several weeks before I have a finish date.

In the meantime — like Gabriel Heattor used to say, “There’s good news tonight, folks!”  —  that’s exactly the way I felt when I closed the manuscript document Friday night at 8:50 pm PST.