Something old and Something new

About two miles down the road from our house there is a little country grocery store owned by the McDonalds. It's been there longer than I've been alive and the McDonald's have owned it that whole time. Which in and of itself is pretty amazing.
Just inside the door on your left there is a bulletin board. It has also been there longer than I can remember. People post special events and puppies and kittens, cars, firewood and other things for sale there. I've been checking it for years. You never know when you'll find a treasure.
Well Friday we ran in to get something to drink on the way to town. As is my habit, I stopped to give the bulletin board a quick once over. THERE IT WAS.... something I've been missing for all of my adult life.....
A woodburning cookstove. Specifically an Elmira Stoveworks Sweetheart woodburning cookstove.
Now before you start wondering if I've completely gone off the deep end, let me explain. When I was much, much younger my grandparents bought an old house with all it's contents. One of the things in the house was a woodburning cookstove. They gave that cookstove to my parents for our kitchen.
Of course we had a regular stove too. However, the wood stove gave extra warmth on winter days, simmered great soups when the electricity went out and made a great place to finish boiling down maple sap into syrup. The oven also made a good place to dry out your sneakers on rainy days...as long as you didn't close the even door! More than once I put my socks on the warming shelf above the cooking lids before I went to bed so that I could have warm socks to put on in the morning when the house was chill from the night.
So as you can see woodburning cookstoves hold a special place in my heart full of warm memories.. pardon the pun.
So there was this stove all black cast iron and shiny chrome. I pulled off one of the phone number slips. I then proceeded to hem and haw about calling. Brian finally called. It turned out the owners lived just a little way down the road from us, so we went off to take a look.
It was just a wonderful up close as it looked in the picture! The lady even had the original owners manual and a cookstove cookbook. I really wanted it but didn't think we could swing the $500 asking price.
I told them we'd need to think about it and we'd call back in the morning. Well we didn't think very long. Brian called back that same night and asked what their bottom dollar was. The nice little old lady, who had owned the stove, told him she had been talking with her husband and he said since we wanted it so bad he would let it go for $400.
Brian, Kate and Dillon went after it on Saturday morning while I cooked buttermilk pancakes for breakfast. Now it's in our garage, waiting for the new chimney in the sunroom to be built.
I can hardly wait!!