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By H. RAMSEY TERHUNE
■Upfwhannock New* Contributing Writer
Comfort, a soft and affectionate word! Home, a word breathing memories, thoughts of warmth, love and family!
We were delivering Christmas baskets, but the old house was needy as well. The empty bucket on the well needed a dipper. The scratchy clapboards had long needed paint. Honeysuckle covered the little outhouse. And there was no smoke coming out of the chimney.
“Guess there’s no one home,” we concluded. It was 10 o’clock the day before Christmas. But a second rap on the old back door brought a muffled response and a clicking of the time-worn metal lock.
The frail, gray-haired widow was robed in a long, droopy gown. “I was just getting up,” she smiled. “My arthritis is so bad.”
After introductions and explanations of our mission, she invited us to “set out” our box, which was filled with a frozen turkey, a fruit cake, all sorts of canned goods, holiday sweets and a big sack of potatoes, on her kitchen table.
“You have no fire!” It was half question, half astonishment.
The big black kitchen stove stood rigid and inhospitable, but the warming oven bore a telltale white sign.
“Isn’t this an old Home Comfort?” we asked, already knowing the answer.
Receiving an affirmative reply, accompanied by another smile, we briskly lifted the lids. An old newspaper plus some kindling from the woodbox, a priming squirt from the coal oil can, and the old Home Comfort sprang to life.
The warmth and the dull roar as the draft pulled the smoke and sparks up the chimney changed ev1 erything and everybody. The kitchen looked brighter, we talked louder, and the old woman laughed.
We all agreed: “There’s nothing like an old Home Comfort.” They’re maybe not as common as rural mailboxes, but like the mailbox, we all knew about them.
The next place we visited was a white farmhouse. It belonged to a farmer and wife who, for all the world, looked like the couple in Norman Rockwell’s famous painting “The Angelis.” The short, smiling hostess ushered us graciously through the living room and into the kitchen..
The lean old farmer was well past 80, and, with blood running thin in his veins, sat crowding the kitchen stove warming his skinny legs. ' “Pull up- a chair next to the stove,” the old gentleman encour
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