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The Air Smelled Dirty

Massachusetts poet, Marge Piercy, remembers when houses were heated with coal. My family referred to our coal furnace as “The Octopus”.

The Air Smelled Dirty Everyone burned coal in our neighborhood, soft coal they called it from the mountains of western Pennsylvania where my father grew up and fled as soon as he could, where my Welsh cousins dug it down in the dark. The furnace it fed stood in the dank basement, its many arms upraised like Godzilla or some other monster. It was my job to pull out clinkers and carry them to the alley bin. Mornings were chilly, frost on windows etching magic landscapes. I liked to stand over the hot air registers the warmth blowing up my skirts. But the basement scared me at night. The fire glowed like a red eye through the furnace door and the clinkers fell loud and the shadows came at me as mice scampered. The washing machine was tame but the furnace was always hungry. Marge Piercy Wellfleet, Massachusetts

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