The Saturday We Warmed Mom’s House

Mom was sitting at her own kitchen table in her good wool coat, the navy one she wore to funerals, with both hands wrapped around a coffee cup that had quit steaming a while ago.

A little space heater the size of a bread box hummed by her feet.

It was the only warm thing in the room, and she had pulled her chair right up against it.

“Well, look who it is,” she said, like nothing in the world was wrong. “Sit down, Gary. There’s coffee. I’ll warm it up for you.”

I didn’t sit down. I walked into the dining room and looked at the thermostat on the wall, the old round one Dad put in the year I started high school. It said 55.

“Mom,” I said, standing in the doorway with my cap still in my hand. “It’s fifty-five degrees in this house. Your furnace is barely running.”

“It runs fine,” she said. “I just keep it down. Propane went up again, and I don’t need the whole house warm. I live in the kitchen anyway.”

That was a Tuesday in early November. I’m a seed dealer, and I had been out dropping off seed corn at a customer’s two miles north, so I swung by the home place on the way back.

I wish I could tell you I swung by every week. I didn’t.

Between harvest and spring seed orders, fall is the busiest stretch of my year, and I had told myself I saw Mom every Sunday at church.

At church she always wore her coat. Half the older ladies at St. John’s Lutheran wear their coats through the service, because the sanctuary is drafty and the council watches the gas bill. I never thought a thing about it.

Now I watched her breath show, just faintly, when she laughed at something on the radio.

In her own kitchen. In the house where she had raised two boys and buried a husband.

“How long has it been like this?” I asked, and I pulled out the chair across from her and held my hands near the heater, because I couldn’t help it.

She thought about lying to me. I could see her think about it.

Mom has never been a good liar, which is one of the things I love most about her.

“Since the first cold snap,” she said. “End of September. It’s not so bad, Gary. I go to bed early with the electric blanket, and I’m warm all night.”

“And all day you sit in your coat,” I said. I said it quietly.

I have never once raised my voice to my mother, and I was not about to start on a Tuesday.

She looked down into her cup. “Money’s tight this year,” she said. “That’s all it is. It’ll be easier once I get used to it.”

I knew exactly what money she meant, and my stomach turned over.

I had known about it for three years and let it sit, the way a man lets a noise in his truck sit until it turns into something worse.

My dad, Walt Thorsen, farmed the home place for forty-one years. When he died, Mom cash-rented the tillable ground to the Hendersons down the road, and that rent and her Social Security kept her going.

But there were twenty-five acres along Salt Creek that Dad had put into the Conservation Reserve Program back in the nineties.

That ground floods every spring, and it never once paid to farm it.

The government pays a yearly rent to whoever owns ground like that, to keep it in grass.