Mincey’s Musings
Year One, Week Three

Cat on a Hot Coal Stove

Tennessee Williams once penned a play entitled “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”. There was a 1958 movie based on this play starring Elizabeth Taylor (as Maggie Politt), Paul Newman (as Brick), Burl Ives (as Big Daddy), Larry Gates (as Dr. Baugh), and several others. Liz Taylor, who died of congestive heart failure at age 79 in 2011, is most famous to me for her many marriages and commercials for White Diamond perfume. Burl Ives, who died in 1995 of oral cancer at age 85, was a famous singer, immortalized for his narration and singing in Bass and Rankin’s animated 1969 TV short “Frosty the Snowman”. Larry Gates was a famous stock actor who for many years portrayed Harlan (H. B.) Lewis from 1983 until his death from leukemia in 1996 on the CBS soap opera “Guiding Light”. Edgar Allan Poe wrote the famous short story “The Black Cat”.

I think I have read Poe’s story, though I feel an inclination to read it again. I have never read Williams’ play nor seen the movie version of the work. I have never seen an actual cat on a hot tin roof, though my mother had several cats and we lived in many houses with tin roofs.

We did, however, once have a black cat. We also had a Warm Morning™ coal stove in the living room. Many families that lived in the Appalachian area had these stoves as the sole source of heating their homes during the eras of the 1900s when coal production and usage was at its peak. Schools and business also used coal to fire the boilers that produced the steam heat that heated and powered consolidated schools and huge, brick factories.

But, there was a time when coal was king and my family had both a black coal stove and a black cat. Many rural families took down their stoves for the annual spring cleaning, storing them safely until needed the next fall. This made more sitting room in the living room during warm months.

The only time my father took down his stove was when age, use, and safety concerns required purchase of a new stove. Otherwise, every spring my mother would polish the stove from top to bottom with Cloverleaf® lard. I still remember the delicious smell of that melting lard when the first fire was built in the fall. It was slightly different from the smell of lard melting in Mother’s iron skillets when she was frying “taters” or baking cornbread.

There is only one time known to us that the black cat of discussion paid any attention to the heating stove. Dad was “cold-natured”, and he built his first fire earlier than most, and he kept making fires longer than most of our similarly situated acquaintances. Even so, there was still more of the year than not that the stove would be cool to touch of either man or beast.

Black cats are reputedly a sign of bad luck, obviously not just to others but to themselves as well. On one of the days when the stove was hottest, our black cat jumped from the floor and landed with all four feet directly on top of the stove!

I wasn’t home when this happened, but my mother with amazement told me all about it. She said the cat had never done that before, and you can be assured never did so again.

Poor Blackie (an original name for sure) suffered enough to learn from her lesson. She licked her paws for the longest kind of time. She recovered completely from her few seconds of agony and became a much wiser animal. On the hottest day of the year, that poor cat would walk as far from the stove as possible.

A burnt child dreads the fire, and a burnt cat dreads a hot stove. Next I’ll share about another strange cat tale.