It’s a Good Thing
Oh yes, this last cold snap smacks me in the face when I step outside and leaves my cheeks as red as if I had been struck. Oh, how I love the little lever on the furnace thermostat. I do turn the thermostat down a bit during the hours of sleep as a cooler home makes for a better, sounder nights sleep. The cold weather prompts more sunshine days than gloomy warmer days and that prompts the shades on the south-facing windows to be raised as soon as the sun wants to peep in. Let that wonderful warmth in.
A lever on the thermostat and raising of window shades are a good thing to make a cold day seem more tolerable. I remember several winters in the mid-seventies when the only thing that made a cold day tolerable was making sure Orlin and I had enough wood split to keep the Warm Morning stove going to heat the home. Warm Morning stoves were a wonderful brand of free standing heat elements that needed to be hooked to the chimney and heat was just an armload of wood away.
Our family was living in the brick schoolhouse just outside of Buffalo Lake, Minnesota, at the time I am speaking of. The brick walls were very thick and there was no way any amount of winter sun could warm them. What had been the gymnasium for the school we had made into our three bedroom living area. With the bulk of the wall height being below ground level, the Warm Morning stove in the living room kept the entire living area comfortable. A bucket of coal for the hours during the night kept the home comfortable without anyone needing to get up during the night to keep the fire going. There was always a stack of wood right next to the stove for the morning feeding.
Orlin was managing the fleet of buses for the Buffalo Lake school system as well as being one of the drivers. I got on board and got my license and also had a morning and evening bus route. Orlin and I spent a lot of time in the fall and winter weekends building a good supply of split wood for the adjacent wood room directly behind the living room. It was amazing how much split wood could disappear during a cold snap much like we are having now. During the winter, sometimes after I got back home from the morning bus pick-up route, I could be found on the southwest side of our acre splitting wood to ease the amount that would have to be split on the weekends.
Directly across the road from our schoolhouse lived Bill and Esther Miller. Both were in their 80s and had never had their own family. They were thrilled to have the schoolhouse occupied to give them neighbors to watch and also to know there was someone close if they needed help. Oh, there was a lot of activity for them to take in and they enjoyed every bit of it and we enjoyed them as well. It was not uncommon during my wood splitting episodes for Bill to trek across the road and invite me over for a cup of coffee. Both of them were very slight in stature with huge warm hearts. Esther had given up baking many years prior, but there was always a cookie to go with the coffee. After a cup of instant Maxwell coffee and a cookie, I would slide my boots back on and finish the amount of wood to split that I had given myself as a challenge to do. I never gave it a thought . . . actually enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment to help ease the extra work load from Orlin. Weekends had more on the agenda than just working on filling the wood room.
Sitting here enjoying a cup of coffee as the sun warms the south through the windows, I marvel at times past . . . those times still bring a smile to me. I wouldn’t trade those times or those memories for anything. There may be an ax in the garage today, but I let my fingers do the walking on the thermostat and the shade strings.
In life, remember to give and have no memory of it, or take and remember it always.