This being the warmest winter I can remember for our state, my mind flashes back to the coldest one I remember ….it occurred in 1966/67. Those were lean times for us and in an effort to save some money we had rented and moved with our two little boys to an old farm-house in Enola, which we got for a pittance.
We were lulled by a fun-filled summer of swimming, hiking, and cooking outdoors under the big shade trees. We even had a little Shetland pony which–but that’s another story, for another time. Our little boys even got to pick cotton [and I say ‘picked’ loosely because they only pulled a few bolls for the fun of it] in the field across the road. That was a one time adventure because that was the last year cotton was grown there.
Reveling in the great summer we’d experienced we were congratulating ourselves on a move well made just as the cold weather arrived and we found ourselves totally unprepared for the bitter, unprecedented arctic air. It got to minus ten degrees that winter and hovered around zero for weeks on end. Snow, but mostly ice, covered everything, four-foot icicles hung from the roof and it was brutally cold in that drafty old farm-house. I’m reminded of the McBroom story of a winter so cold that sunlight froze on the floor…that’s just the way it seemed to me in that house. That intense cold lasted most of the winter, which in itself was most unusual.
We kept ourselves from freezing by closing off the living room from the rest of the house and bundling up in many layers of clothing. The space heaters were woefully inadequate in most of the rooms, especially in the kitchen and dining room. I’d put on my coat and gloves when I went to the kitchen to cook, and much of the food in the cabinets was frozen solid. [In fact, anything we didn’t want frozen we’d put in the refrigerator]. An example of this was the shortening I used to make biscuits which was kept in the cabinet; if I didn’t melt it before I made the biscuits they would actually come out of the oven with lumps of shortening still in them after they were cooked. Needless to say, I didn’t do much cooking that required me to be in the kitchen for long periods of time; our winter fare, for the most part, consisted of pots of beans and soups which required minimal tending.
We wore layers of clothing to bed and piled on all the blankets we owned, making it almost impossible to move because of the weight of the covers. Sometimes my body would actually feel sore from all that extra nightly weight. That brought back childhood memories of sleeping at my grandfather’s house in an unheated bedroom with so much cover on the bed I couldn’t move, trapped as I was between the covers and a feather mattress.
Somehow we survived that winter and as spring made an appearance our little boys were finally able to leave the living room and ride their Christmas tricycles on the front porch. The summer proved to be a cool one with August actually being quite chilly. We swore we wouldn’t spend another winter in that old house, especially since we were expecting a new baby in September. Our search for a house to buy finally came to fruition and we moved into it on Halloween. It was a snug, warm house and, coming as we were from that drafty farm-house, we were doubly appreciative of it. That winter was also a cold one but not as cold as the year before and we were warm and comfortable in our new house.
I don’t know how the old timers made it in their shot-gun style homes with no insulation, with daylight showing between the boards of the walls and floors and only a wood stove to heat the whole house. They surely were made from sturdier stock than most of us today.
Since that winter I’ve rarely seen zero degree weather here and I don’t think I ever remember it getting below zero again, certainly not ten below zero. That suits me just fine, I don’t like cold weather anymore. In fact this winter has been perfect; I’m placing an order for more of the same for next winter….and the next…and the next…
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