Cold. Oh my, it was cold outside.
Daddy had placed an outdoor thermometer outside the front “picture” window. Through the already 60-year-old glass, he aimed his flashlight on it. Was -18°.
They spoke about it, my Mama and my Daddy. One of the coldest they’d known. I couldn’t imagine what it must have felt like outside that night. Even on the inside, it was a struggle for my Daddy to keep the house warm, but he did! The dining room, their bedroom, and of course the upstairs rooms were bitterly cold, but we were all warm and comfy in the living room on that coldest night.In those years, the 1897 house had no insulation in its walls. No storm windows covering the thin glass of the large windows throughout the house. If you touched the outside walls or doors, you felt the cold. Frost permeated the cracks and edges and inside of the window panes.
On that cold night, Mama and Daddy pulled their bed through the curtain-covered double-size, arched doorway into the living room. Larry and I slept in the big cushioned chairs, each with a matching massive footstool. One was a wine-colored, one a gray – both boucle’ fabric and both second-hand pass me downs from family or left in the house, purchased just a few years prior. Mama made the “beds” up for us – flannel sheets, woolen blankets. The door to the dining room was closed and the curtains pulled to their bedroom so as to hold all the heat in that living room space.
Daddy heated the house with wood. Those were the days before an oil furnace or the hot water heat running through copper pipes, the length of the baseboards. Those were the days of the massive cast iron furnace in the basement, directly below the living room, with one large floor register, providing the room with gravity heat. He left the room several times throughout the night, going through the kitchen and back room, into the cold attached woodshed, and down the basement stairs, adding wood to that enormous furnace.
Although my Daddy worked an office job in Coldwater through the week, he spent every fall and winter Saturday cutting, splitting, and hauling wood to heat our house. Mama packed him a thermos of coffee and sandwiches of left over roast beef. He bundled up in his red wool hunting coat and pants and his warmest boots, opened the towering, heavy doors of the red barn, and started up the tractor. His small Ford 8N tractor pulled a red “wagon” made from the bed of an old pickup. Down the road he went, turning into the neighbor’s woodlot, where he worked all day. Oftentimes, Larry was with him. Sometimes I was, as well. But we both had to help unload the wood, when he brought it back to the house, pulled across the back yard, close to the house, and opened the basement window. As Larry and I tossed the pieces of wood, one by one through the open window, downstairs, Daddy stacked it higher and higher, sometimes reaching the ceiling above. That night, over a hot supper, Daddy and Mama’s hearts were relieved to have enough wood for at least the next week!
The otherwise screened porch was covered with heavy plastic during the winter, providing somewhat of a wind break when entering the kitchen door on the north side of the house. Ice accumulated on the porch roof, and later we had to be careful of it dropping as temperatures began to rise.
The snow crunched below our feet as we walked across the yard on those days, and Mama didn’t let Larry and me play outside during that bitter cold. But when temps reached the 20’s, we bundled up, and went outdoors, making snowmen and igloo huts, playing until we were cold and ornery. Well, I was ornery. Larry stuffed snow down the back of my coat, and we came back into the house, arguing, with beet-red faces, runny noses, and ice-packed wet clothes. Mama put our outdoor wear on her wooden clothes rack to dry near the big register, and wrapped us in those woolen blankets. We stood over the heat bouncing from one foot to another until our feet were both cold and hot at the same time.
Many years have come and gone, but the heritage created within and without the walls of that yellow house continues today through us -Daddy and Mama’s children and grandchildren. Much has changed, but in those early days, when our hearts were young and innocent, our yellow house, both inside and out, was the perfect place in the winter.
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