Two kinds of house warming

I'm thinking of house warming in two ways.

First, there is the house warming -- somewhat of a planned and arranged gathering, by which friends and family do a party in a family's new house, or newly remodeled house, thereby transforming the place from being just a new building into being a comfortable domicile and home.

Then, there is the task of keeping house and home warm during the cold months of winter.

Since I was pastor of churches for many years, we have moved to new places many times. A new church to work with meant moving away from the familiarity of one community into another where we didn't know people yet, and getting reestablished in home, becoming acquainted with new surroundings, and beginning to make new friends and co-workers.

Churches have many ways of welcoming and greeting a new pastor's family. One is just to have many people stopping by the parsonage to say hello and make acquaintance. Another is to have a pounding for the new pastor and family. Poundings are seemingly becoming a thing of the past, but they still happen in some places. A pounding involves the people coming by to leave a pound of this and a pound of that, almost always food items, to share with the pastor and family. Sometimes a pounding would happen as a group fellowship, maybe along with a fellowship dinner where everyone shares a potluck meal. Eating together seems to be a fine way of getting to know people and cementing new working relationships. The idea of a pounding is to stock the new family's food pantry. It might also mean that the pastor and family comes in to find that the parsonage refrigerator has been newly stocked with goodies of all kinds.

I also became acquainted with the custom as found in some communities in which a housewarming is accompanied by a blessing of the home as the people move in and begin to make the house a home. That would be a brief time of worship in which Scriptures would be read, prayers lifted up and songs would be sung, asking the Lord's blessing on the life of the family whose home this becomes. I really enjoyed being asked to lead in that kind of housewarming and blessing of a home.

Some years ago, when the phone companies had ceased keeping their own phone equipment in houses, and had begun expecting families to buy their own phones to be connected, we made a move from Searcy to Berryville.

When I was loading the truck for the move, I had had little thought about the phone, other than that it was packed away in a box. When that box was loaded onto the truck, it was placed in a niche near the front of the truck. It never occurred to me that that might become a problem.

When we arrived in Berryville in the afternoon and began unloading our belongings into the house, I heard the phone ring. I looked for a phone in the house, but found none. There were of course no cell phones in those days. The ringing continued time and again. Finally I found that a former pastor had installed a ringer in the carport, at the back door, so he could hear the phone ring when he was outside or at the car. But there was no phone in the house, just the ringer; and I had no way of answering it.

I tried to unload the truck in a way that would allow me to get to the front of the load as quickly as possible, and eventually was able to get to the box with our phone in it, but it took me a couple of hours to accomplish that. In the meantime, the church people were trying to call us to see if the new pastor and family had arrived so as to welcome them and to offer help with the unloading. Sometimes things just get a little complicated. Eventually the house got warmed and things worked out well, although not without a few discombobulations.

Sometimes life has its discombobulations.

It was 26 degrees when the day started yesterday, and I had memories of warming the house back when I was a small boy. From the time I was born until I was 13 years old, we lived in the old, old farmhouse which had stood on the farm for probably 100 years. We had chimneys at both ends of the house where heating stoves could be installed for winter.

The north chimney was in one of the bedrooms, and the south chimney was in the living room. We didn't have a fireplace, just the chimneys for the stove pipe to connect. Our nice stove stood about four feet from the wall, so there was a riser pipe coming up from the stove, an elbow, and a pipe running horizontally to the chimney. I remember wondering at Christmastime how Santa would be able to come down the chimney in that situation, but he always did it some way.

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Editor's note: This column first ran Nov. 1, 2017. Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge and can be contacted by email at [email protected], or call 621-1621. The opinions expressed are those of the author.