Grateful Blog: Day 23: They just came to fill the oil tank up today. Yeah, we still burn oil for our heat. It’s ‘old school’ in a way I suppose and about as environmentally friendly as your average Chevy Suburban. The thing is I really like oil heat. It’s warm (not hot) and moist (not dry) and generally stays warm once it gets there. It’s as expensive as anything else (It was a whopping $930 fill up this morning for 225 gallons but that’ll last us roughly 9 months). If you go down into the basement it’s hard to miss, all 16 square feet of it. It’s a beast. Installed in 1948 it’s the only furnace this house has ever known. Last year it actually exploded due to a clogged nozzle but even after blowing one door open and another off it was a small repair from living to fight another day. The thing is I have a hard time replacing something that’s worked faithfully for 64 years. If you had a car that old and still running you’d enter it in a show. If I were still working that good at 64 I’d take out an ad in the paper. Just to show off. So this morning, I’m Grateful for one of life’s simple and oh so complicated pleasures: Heat. And specifically I’m Grateful to the fine folks at Waterman Waterbury who built that behemoth inMinneapolisin 1948. It’s still a thing of beauty these many years later, and its warm heat and low rumble is a lot to be Grateful for on these cold days and nights of winter.
