NEWS HOME

Home is Where the Heat Is
By Kym Miller

Smoke billows toward the ceiling as I plunge my arm deep into the belly of “the beast.” This nickname for our tempestuous wood-burning stove seems fitting as my attempt to create an updraft—positioning a torch of flaming paper high up into the flue—backfires. The smoke from the kindling blaze I’ve just lit is thwarting my efforts by stinging my eyes and making me cringe back, thus creating more of a down, out, and all around draft. I persevere, pushing the pile of sticks closer together, squeezing my eyes shut and thrusting my arm forward. Where there is smoke there is fire and where there is fire there must be heat—and heat is what I am after. These fledgling attempts at heat production are not the result of a hiatus in a wooded cabin or temporary furnace failure, but are part of an odyssey which has turned our house of once disparate individuals into a thriving humming home of inter-reliance.

"The Beast"

Each morning in fall and early winter, family members were pulled from our cozy beds by the same sense of purpose and enthusiasm. We were attempting to make it through November heating our three-story, 3,000-square-foot house using only this temperamental smoke-belcher tucked in the corner of our basement. The motivation for this messy endeavor originated from our year without buying: twelve months in which our family purchased only what we could eat or use up completely. Left cold and dissatisfied by the perpetual want/buy cycle, my husband Tim, our three young daughters, and I embarked on our purchase-free experiment in hopes of discovering a warmer, more fulfilling existence. While copious lessons ensued from our minimalistic year, the most impactful result was our sharpened awareness of the plentiful resources at our disposal.

As we faced twelve solid months without the ability to buy things, our thinking morphed into a depression-era mentality in which every object was potentially valuable—its worth just waiting to be realized. This lesson first came into sharp focus when an errant ball smashed through a little windowpane in our basement. Unsettled by the prospect of a plastic bag fixit job for the remainder of the experiment, my husband discovered, in the back of the furnace room, a picture frame with a broken pane of glass, which was soon cut to size and fit perfectly. In years past we would have thrown the glass away and ordered a new custom-fitted pane. Why had we failed to see solutions that were right under our noses? For the rest of the year, as necessity gave birth to invention, we began to see how items already in our possession, in one form or another, could take the place of things we would have purchased. Stickers sealed our packages together in lieu of tape, old shower rods sufficed to support our aging grill, and a burbling fountain took the place of a room vaporizer.

Even as the end-date to our experiment floated by, our eyes had so adjusted to the new light of possibility that we continued to view our home as a “free store.” No matter the season, we found ourselves refueling our dormant imaginations by morphing vitamin bottle filler into cotton balls, a vase into a wooden-spoon holder, or beads and string into kid birthday presents. Where once money and the ability to earn it had been the most prized attribute, now creativity and resourcefulness became equally valuable. Suddenly everyone, down to our four-year-old, contributed to the prosperity of the family.

The Miller family around the time of their year without buying.

“What does that do?” our littlest daughter asked, pointing to our antique wood burning stove. After quickly explaining to her that it made heat, she replied, “like the furnace.” This started us wondering whether it could really take the place of the furnace for at least part of the cold season. As if trying to drive home the point, gusts of autumn wind daily cleared the leaves from our neglected woodpile and scattered fire-starting twigs across our yard.

Why hadn’t we thought of using the free fuel at our disposal to heat the house? In the haze of marketing, it seems we had been compartmentalizing all of our possessions into their touted purposes. Only vaporizers moisturized, only tape stuck things together, and only oil made heat. We had been throwing away the plastic sacks our produce came in, only to spend hard-earned cash on sandwich bags, and disposing of our grass clippings and fruit peels only to turn around and buy prepackaged compost. Our minds had failed to unearth the potential in our possessions because we had been trained to acquire our wants from the mall.

Nor had we previously allowed for the time necessary to realize what lay before us. The forced compartmentalization of our stuff seemed to apply to our lives as well, splintering our days into shards of remote activity. We were off to our clubs to exercise instead of mowing our own lawns, driving our kids to soccer instead of having them organize pick-up games, racing to the mall for bed covers instead of turning leftover fabric into a quilt, and gobbling down someone else’s version of food as we drove. The houses that we passed as we sped by seemed cold and unlit, because—as was the case with our own abode—no one was home. We had fallen for clarity and efficiency over diversity and spontaneity, and the subsequent emptiness and persistent want that we often felt was the payback for our folly.

The transformation brought about by our buy-nothing year allowed us to finally produce the heat which had eluded us—the spark of ingenuity, the flame of engagement, and the resulting warmth of a purposeful experience—right where we live. Whether we’re cutting bottles into drinking glasses, sewing together old jeans to make a dog bed cover, or fashioning tea tins into Farkle containers (a surprisingly addicting dice game!) to give as Christmas presents, the pursuit of our wants now adds to the warmth of our home rather than detracting from it.

This homemade life doesn’t always look pretty. My latest project is figuring out how to prevent last summer’s fruit fly infestation from returning to our three compost bins, and the cat-clawed rug in the family room seems immune to any amateur repairs. Nor are the kids always up for patches on their jeans (our eleven-year-old still professes that, “newer is cuter”). Yet the fulfillment we derive from this creative and empowered approach to our wants seems to make them fewer and further between.

As our November 31st “alternative heat” deadline passed and the hum of the oil furnace filled our place, we still found numerous occasions, such as a surprise visit from a neighbor, to relight our wood stove. All winter long and into early spring, we knelt, soot streaked and smelling of smoke, before this altar of interconnected richness, paying homage to those waving, dancing, rising banners of heat.

Kym and her family undertook this transformation in their lives over ten years ago. Since that time, the kids have grown, Tim now works for Enhabit and the house has undergone an energy-efficient makeover, and Kym continues to publish books and articles on frugal living and other topics.

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