COLD WEATHER ISN'T REALLY COLD !

From widespread power outages in the South to deadly car accidents in the Northeast and record snowfall in between, the massive nor'easter that is beating down on the Eastern Seaboard is slated to be the biggest of the season, according to forecasters. I grew up at a time when you didn't complain about winter. Blizzards raged up the Northeast and that was that. There was little real time weather forecasting, a strong sense of foreboding. Old people wrapped in quilts sat by the hearth, gumming their chicken bones, their rheumy eyes turned upward, listening to the wind in the chimney, and they said things like, "Sounds cold outside." That was about it by way of prognostication. The wind blew and blew. Zero was a mild chill back then. Ten below was considered cold. At twenty below you had to take precautions. We knew to dress in layers. The car froze up, and when you raised the hood it screeched so loud that icicles fell off the eaves of the front porch. I don't say this by way of complaining, not at all. The cold of a New England winter gave us a sense of purpose, to persevere, to go to school no matter what and to keep shoveling the walk and throw the snow up on the snowbank fifteen feet overhead, clearing the freshly fallin snow from the sidewalk with a clothesline tied to our belts so that in case of avalanche, they could pull us out in time, watching for incoming icicles that dropped like artillery shells.
There was no light weight thermal wear back then, you kept warm by the exertion of carrying heavy clothing,an eighty pound child might wear thirty pounds of clothing. Running was out of the question. You simply had to face the beast of a cold wind and stare it down. And also the danger of voiding the bladder at ten below when you hear your own bodily fluid turn to ice chips as it hits the ground and you wonder how far up the golden arc this ice might come.

My father was a stoic. He believed that if you couldn't see your breath when you talked, then the furnace was turned up too high, I remember exhaling vaporous clouds as I toiled over homework, that's just how it was. An alien experience to most southern Americans and so one has a responsibility to tell the story, just as when a child picks up an LP and asks, "What is this?" and you must try to explain about high-fidelity sound and woofers and tweeters, and how the needle on the tonearm rode in the grooves of a vinyl disc and produced stereophonic sound, which of course your child does not believe for one second, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.
In winter I arose every morning in silence, pulled on 30 pounds of clothing, and ate a cup of Cream of Wheat cereal and marched out into the storm. Feeding the farm animals before walking to school, buses? There weren't any. And school never closed from bad weather, if you made it there class was in session. Walking back home from school was difficult at the very least because we lived at the top of the highest of hills. The street was at times not cleared of snow because the hill was to steep for the snow plow to make the grade. It was cold as an old Hags wort on the end of her nose. Yup it was cold and I remember it fondly.


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