And now that it has arrived, walking my son to Kindergarten every morning is enhanced by the scent of burning wood hanging heavy in air.
Here in Germany, a very popular alternative to the standard wall-mounted oil heaters--especially in this neck of the woods where firewood is plentiful and inexpensive--is the Kaminofen. A Kaminofen is a wood-burning stove used for heat, just like a fireplace. It's equally decorative, but the difference is it's a little stove stuck in the corner of a room (usually the living room), with a large pipe that leads from it into one or more other rooms and exhausts through the roof. It's enclosed, with little glass doors, and is very romantic.
So, beginning this time of year, until about May or so, you can walk outside any time of the day and the air smells like campfires. I love it. It reminds me of summer weekend mornings when I was a musician at the renaissance faire, and I'd smell this smell passing by merchants' booths, where the merchants who lived in the rooms above their shops set to preparing their morning coffee. Or where the glazier stoked her fire nice and hot to make her cups and bowls and figurines throughout the day. Or the mushroom guy, getting ready to sautee his first batch of garlic mushrooms. A particular scent of incense also burned, and pacing through the fair site before opening gate was a magical experience for me. And connected to it all is the image of a medieval village starting its day.
The smell is inspiring to me.
We have a Kaminofen, too. Last year, we didn't use it and were sorry for it. Our electric oil heaters are inefficient at best. We had to crank them very high to heat the rooms to a livable temperature. Our heating bill was enormous, and we were horrified. When we lived in Stuttgart, our heating bill was extremely low--but then, our apartment was very small and in the middle of the building. We barely used the heat.
So, this year, we decided to put our Kaminofen to use. The problem with this thing is, if you're not adept at building fires from scratch, you will have that yummy campfire smell in your house--at which point the idea of a fire and it's wonderful smell stops being yummy and romantic. I have spent the last week attempting to quickly and efficiently build a fire, and keep it stoked, without clouds of smoke escaping and polluting our main living area on the upper level. I've gotten the fire going, and kept it going, but every time we've had to let it die down because of the smell, and then open the windows to air it out.
It's not just my inexperience that's contributing to the problem. There's an art to the technique of fire building, and I'm determined to learn it. However, I'm also certain the joints in the pipes leak. When we moved in, before we painted, I saw the black smoke stains on the walls from the previous tenants (the ones who left all their junk in our garage for six or seven months before clearing it away). And now I know what that funky permanent smell is that haunts the upper floor--stale wood smoke embedded in the walls, a smell so deep that not even painting over it could eliminate it.
We can't really afford to have the pipes looked at and fixed. And I don't like living amid the rogue clouds of smoke that escaped during my hurry to put another log on the fire. I mean it really stinks. It's strong and my hair reeks of it. We will look for a heat-resistant duct tape, however; and I will ask our landlady exactly how to get a proper fire started and maintained (I have a strained relationship with her, and I usually avoid contact) tomorrow.
We may end up foregoing the Kaminofen altogether and make use of a couple of space heaters to supplement our bad oil heaters. But until we definitively elimnate the wood stove as a means of heat, we may all come down with black lung or die of carbon monoxide poisoning.
If, inexplicably, you never hear from me again, you'll know why.
In the meantime, I feel pissy that the wonderful campfire smell that drifts through our village is no longer as inspiring as it is a frustrating reminder of the struggles I have with our own wood burning.
The Kaminofen (wood stove), as an instrument of torture.
