Weather, Or Not

We had a small coal furnace in the basement for many years. The house was old when Mom and Dad bought it, and later of course they renovated and had gas installed. But in my early years, it was coal heat in the frigid Indiana winters. Dad worked in a different time zone in winter -- Indiana used to be split down the middle as to DST -- and poor Mom would get up in the freezing cold and dead dark to go down, shake out the clinkers, and get the stove fired up again of a morning. When it snowed, the pristine white of the snow on the ground would soon be covered in flecks of black from the burning coal.