Quote of the day:
“When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night,the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night.”
― Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth
French Regional Park on a cold winter day
Winter weather has been colder and snowier than normal this year. I am so thankful to live in modern times with central heat and a warm automobile to travel in. Sometimes when I’m shivering as I start out on a trip in the car, I wonder how on earth humans lived in Minnesota before our modern age.
Clearly I’ve become accustomed to a life of comfort that is almost unprecedented in human history. And still, I’ve been wearing long underwear, wool socks, and layers in the house. Our house is not particularly drafty but when the mercury dips below zero, I work hard to resist the urge to crank up the thermostat.
Gracie, our cat, has taken to hanging out in front of furnace registers, curled up in my lap, or cuddled up against my or Jon’s legs in bed. She’s clearly not a cold-weather cat.
Gracie giving me the “I need a lap to cuddle in” look
I spent the first 9 years of my life in an old two-story farmhouse. I can remember the coal-burning furnace in the basement. On the coldest nights Dad would get up in the middle of the night to shovel more coal into the furnace.
My bedroom upstairs had no heat register, just a grill in the floor that let warm air rise up from the first floor. On cold winter mornings, I hated to climb out from under my warm piles of blankets. Once I worked up my nerve to leave my cozy nest, I was careful to hop onto the hand-crocheted rug beside my bed instead of directly on the cold linoleum. I imagine that I dressed in record time in the chill morning air so that I could head downstairs to the kitchen.
Our big country kitchen was a welcoming place with added warmth from the wood-burning stove that my mom cooked our meals on. Before too many years, the big old wood burning stove was replaced by a modern electric stove and the coal-burning furnace was converted to oil-burning. Both updates made the lives of my parents easier but I still feel great nostalgia for the old-fashioned appliances.
Living in the country as we did, winter snow storms could cut us off from the world for days. I remember one particularly snowy winter when the snowplows were slow reaching our road and my dad and the neighbor who lived down the road headed out with tractors with big scoops on the front and cleared the deep snow from the road. It took all day to clear a path for a single car to drive a mile to the corner.
In my later childhood when we had moved to a different farm with a more modern house, we still regularly lost electricity and were snowed in for days during winter blizzards. We survived by spending much of the day in the basement where my mom cooked on a kerosene stove and the poorly drawing fireplace regularly belched smoke into the room.
My dad and brothers spent much of each day out in the cold feeding and tending the livestock and clearing snow. I spent my days reading in the dim basement light, helping my mom prepare meals, and escaping into the cold upstairs in my outdoor clothes when the smoky basement became too much for me.
At night we piled on extra blankets and slept upstairs in the cold. What a celebration we had when the electricity was restored after a two to four day blizzard.
My life today in the city with rare electrical outages, a warm insulated house, well-cleared roads, and modern appliances is such a blessing compared to the lives of my parents and earlier generations!
Today I give thanks for the many blessings of my life and head out into the cold day with a great gratitude that I’m living here now. As the weather chills down even more in the next few days, try counting blessings instead of cursing the cold. If you have plenty to eat, warm clothes to wear, a warm house to sleep in, and a reliable automobile to get you where you need to go you are rich. If you have joy and gratitude in your heart, you will feel even richer.
Winter View
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