KEEPING WARM 
ASTRONOMY’S Space 1982 Calendar 
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The Sun. The Moon. The Planets. 
Beyond the Milky Way 
to the Nebulae where 
Stars are born. 
14 beautiful images 
suitable for framing, plus 
notable dates in astronomy 
and space science. 
ASTRONOMY'S Space 82 Calendar. 
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lors, but rooms were not designated by 
the names or sexes of the occupants. 
There seems to have been no concept of 
personally defined space in the twenti- 
eth-century sense. Melville’s concept of 
interdependence is reinforced by more 
than the image of a house without hall- 
ways. Sleeping arrangements were apt 
to be far more informal than they are in 
our post- Victorian period. Studies of the 
inventories of early houses show that 
beds were set up almost anyplace. In the 
seventeenth century, the best bed, nor- 
mally occupied by the parents of a fam- 
ily, was usually set up in the hall, a 
multipurpose room that was at once the 
most used and the most expensively 
furnished room in the house. In later 
times, the best bedroom moved to the 
second floor although, as we have seen, 
the bedstead itself might be moved 
when the coldest months arrived. 
Children and servants might sleep in 
rooms that were furnished with an as- 
sortment of tools, storage containers, 
and miscellaneous objects such as sad- 
dles, fishing equipment, or old spinning 
wheels. They might also find themselves 
sleeping in spaces that were not even 
finished rooms: for example, attics, sec- 
ond-floor lean-tos, and the spaces at the 
top of back staircases. Harriet Beecher 
Stowe described the experience of two 
boys sleeping in such a space in winter in 
her novel Old Town Folks. Waking in 
the morning to find that a lighted candle 
had been placed on a large chest by an 
early-rising relative, one confessed that 
“one of my sinful amusements consisted 
in lying and admiring the forest of glit- 
tering frostwork which had been made 
by our breath freezing upon the threads 
of the blanket” in a room where “the 
snow, drifting through the loosely 
framed window, often lay in long 
wreaths on the floor.” 
Frugal housewives were not unaware 
of the advantages to be gained by freez- 
ing food in such spaces. Some early 
cookbooks recommended quantity cook- 
ing in the late fall when ingredients were 
abundant. One suggested that as many 
as one hundred pies be baked at Thanks- 
giving time and then stored in blanket 
chests in cold bedchambers. Mrs. Stowe 
described 
a great cold northern chamber, where the 
sun never shone, and where in winter the 
snow sifted in at the window cracks, and ice 
and frost reigned in undisputed sway . . . 
fitted up to be the storehouse of . . . surplus 
treasures. There, frozen solid, and thus well 
preserved in their icy fetters, they formed a 
great repository for all the winter months, 
and the pies baked at Thanksgiving often 
came out fresh and good with the violets of 
April. 
Unless, that is, there was a January 
thaw! 
Despite its advantages in food preser- 
vation, extreme cold in kitchens was an 
inconvenience as well as a source of 
personal discomfort. In 1793, Anna 
Palmer described a problem of provid- 
Old Sturbridge Village, photo by Henry E Peach 
102 
