The center of any home is either the kitchen or the fireplace or both. I now live in Hawaii and fireplaces weren’t high on the list of architechtects, contractors and builders. I think they are now, though. Because a fireplace brings gravitas to a home. Even if it’s 84 degrees, having a living room with a fireplace makes a home seem more substantial.
So at Angus Street, we loved our fireplace. We didn’t have one of those huge kitchens with eat-in counters of granite and bar stools. The kitchen was the kitchen. That was it. But we had a fireplace. It wasn’t an ornate Adams; it was made of simple brick tile.
I remember when I learned that the fireplace could be turned on without wood. Gas would do the trick. There was a small key on the left side of the grate and if turned and lit with a match “(close lid before striking”), flames would appear.
I was very careful when I lit a match and turned it on. My dad would trim our fruit trees—plum, apricot, white peach—which met its demise when my dad built us a life-sized playhouse—and, who knows, maybe even the grapefruit tree contributed to our fires. In the “winter” (this was Los Angeles) we enjoyed wood fires. My mother taught us how to put orange peels into the flames and watch the oil from the skins turn into blue lights. It was, by far, my favorite thing to watch, Hey—and this was even when we had a TV.
Of course, a mantle and fireplace are a big deal at Christmas. Our German advent calendar with sparkling glitter sat on the mantle and became the focus of our pre-Christmas mornings. Closer to the 24t th of December, our stockings would appear.
My own son, raised in Hawaii, has never celebrated a Christmas with a mantle-hung stocking. He had to do with cabinet knobs and door handles. But, in a few years, he will have his mantle-- when we move.
My very favorite days were when it rained. It rained heavily on one of my birthdays when I was at Ivanhoe Elementary School and I felt like my birthday wish was fulfilled.
When I was older, and we had a rainy day, I would come home, put on the fireplace—using the gas, not wood-- and head to the kitchen. It was cinnamon toast time. My mother, home from the Burbank School District, my sister and I would sit on the floor around a rather odd coffee table that fronted the fireplace and eat cinnamon toast cut into strips.
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