When I was a small'ish child I spent quite a bit of time staying at my grandparent's house. (Let me be specific here. I don't distinguish between grandparents as I only ever knew my maternal grandparents. My paternal grandparents were long dead and gone before me)
The house was a three room affair. In the back it had a long, narrow kitchen and dining area that ran the length of the house. Off that was the "living room". It was also a bedroom and the place where the pot bellied stove was during the winter. Then off that was a third room which was also a bedroom and were my grandmother did her sewing.
When I stayed with them during warm weather I'd sleep with my grandmother in the sewing room but in the winter we all three would sleep in the "living room" where the stove was. My grandparents would sleep with their heads up at the head of the bed and I'd sleep with my head down to the foot of the bed.
In cold weather when it came bed time my grandfather would rattle down the ashes (look it up) in the stove and put in kindling wood for the next morning's fire. We all wore "long john's" so with all the quilts we had stacked on us we were fairly comfortable. Until morning at least. At the crack of dawn I was jostled out of sleepfulness and kicked (metaphorically most of the time) out to rush over to the pot bellied stove, open the door and splash a goodly amount of coal oil (kerosene?) on the wood and fling a match in on top of it to get it lit. Then I'd start stacking small lumps of coal on the flames until it got going then put a few more larger lumps on before I could dash back to bed to lie until the chill had somewhat dissipated.
When the cold got tolerable we'd haul out of bed and I'd go to the kitchen to break the ice in the water buckets and Granny would get the fire started in the wood/coal cook stove for coffee. Not that was some kick@$$ coffee. It was in an old, blue speckled, enamel coffee pot. It was not a percolator just a pot and they rarely ever emptied old coffee out of it or cleaned it. Granny would just dump some more fresh 'grinds' into it and pour in some water and put it on to boil for breakfast.
Breakfast at my grandparent's house was some affair, summer or winter. We'd always have bacon, ham (the kind from those old, oval cans), sausage, eggs, biscuits, gravy, red-eye gravy from the ham, jam or jelly (home made) and sorghum molasses. We'd always put that on the stove until it boiled up all foamy and hot and eat that with butter my granny had churned.
That coffee would "put hair on your chest" and I cannot ever remember not drinking it for breakfast. My Dad would put loads of milk and sugar in his but I always wanted mine hot and black. (Somehow hot and black has been a common denominator in my life)
After breakfast it was time to go feed the chickens and collect the eggs. After that I really can't remember a lot about the winter says. In the summer I'd "skin the cat" on the quince tree or play in the creek. In the winter all I can remember doing is listening to Poppy tell stories and cracking and eating black walnuts from the trunk full of them they kept in the attic.
They never had a TV and really the radio was only played on Saturday nights to listen to the Grand Ole Opry on WSM out of Nashville, TN. Decades before video games and home computers. I guess it was pretty much if you could not find something to interest yourself in you just sat around and whined about being bored. Of course, when I was growing up, whining was pretty much a quick ticket to getting an A$$ busted so it was mostly find something to do and shut up. :-)
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