The Big Chill...

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Things have warmed up a lot since yesterday's reminder of winters past. There used to be winters when this was the norm for a week at a time; months when the indicator never went above freezing. You adapted to it.

I can usually judge the temperature without looking at the thermometer. On a cold night, the woodstove burns up everything you loaded into it the previous evening (an empty stove in the morning tells you is was cold last night). The bigger the birds look (they fluff themselves up to keep warm), the colder it is; and below

-10 degrees the horses have frost on their eyelashes.

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Simple weather changes predict rising or falling temperatures: snow is "cleared off cold," meaning that clearing skies usually indicate colder weather; and conversely, a sunny day deteriorating into cloudiness usually means it will "warm up to snow."

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We lived in a mobile home while we built the house we now inhabit. At -10 degrees, one of the drain lines would freeze, a fact you would discover when you dumped the dirty dishwater into the kitchen sink and it quietly encountered the ice plug and backed up into the bathtub. Then you had two choices: forget about showering until warmer weather; or work for an hour or so with a plunger, a plastic cup to bail with, and boiling water from the tea kettle.

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The first winter we lived in that marvelous tin house, we went away for the Christmas holiday and returned to drains so frozen that we had to pee into a chamber pot until April.

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This morning it is thirty degrees warmer than it was yesterday. Ten degrees on the plus side feels pretty good. For a few days, perhaps, I will not think about the horror we are creating by warming the globe, but while I stick my head in the snow, go to Robin’s ‘hood to learn some easy things you can do to keep my thermometer reading where it should be.