The house I grew up in had multiple little rooms. The first floor had, walking in a circle from the back door, the following: the kitchen, the dining room (for company), the living room (also for company), the front hall with the front stairs, the family room, the breakfast room (which also had the back staircase), and back to the kitchen. The breakfast room is where we ate most of our family meals. Meals were usually pretty formal: the serving dishes would be on the table before we were called in from outside, or down from upstairs, to eat.
When I was in my early teens, my mother decided that the family room needed a woodburning stove. And so one was installed. It was exactly as you picture, that cast-iron, rectangular, black hulking box. It lurked menacingly at the middle-right of the room, nearest to the door that led into the breakfast room. We didn't use it terribly often, as the heat would dry out the piano.
For some reason, the chimney for the stove was inadequately capped when it was installed. And so periodically, some unfortunate bird would decide to take a look-see down that interesting blackened tube and end up flapping and bonking around inside the stove. Once in a while, an unlucky bird would expire and we'd have to fish it out of the stove. If we were really lucky, one of the little doors on the stove would pop open and the panic-stricken bird would flap around the house klunking into walls and fixtures until we could corner it, throw a towel over it, and fling it, relieved, into the back yard. This happened not terribly often, but often enough that we were all pretty good at trapping birds.
One day, mom was preparing dinner. She'd baked a chicken. She put it on the breakfast room table and returned to the kitchen.
About five minutes later, I walked through the breakfast room.
Hmmm.
I went to the kitchen. "MOM. There's a dead bird on the table."
Gasp. Hasty hurrying into the breakfast room. And indeed, there was a dead bird.
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