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Cold, Then and Now
My mother is 90 years old. She grew up on a dairy farm in rural Waukesha County, west of Milwaukee. Some time back she told me that they didn’t have indoor plumbing at her house until she was in first grade, and they didn’t have it at her school until second grade.
At Christmas I was talking with her and my (pre-teen) kids about how different things are now, and I brought up the topic. She said, “It wasn’t so bad. I don’t remember ever being cold.”
I just returned from a weekend Cub Scout camping trip in Eagle Cave. The temperature in the cave itself was fine. But the bathroom was about 150 yards away, uphill. It was modern plumbing in a mostly heated cement block building. I don’t believe she was never cold.
Did I mention that the temperature on the car thermostat this morning when we left at 7:30 AM was -12 F?
Published in General
Did I tell you about the new thermostat for Modern Americans? It only has two settings — too hot and too cold.
I didn’t live in a house with indoor plumbing until sixth grade. You do realize that chamber pots were in use when it was too uncomfortable to venture outside? Some of us don’t have great memory for details like having been especially cold from winter weather. I’m really bad about that while my memory is good for some things.
Surfing the net I saw where some Lefty apparently said next summer was going to be unbearably hot since President Trump pulled us out of the Paris Accord.
I can’t remember if my memory is still pretty good or not.
It’s also his fault that my driveway is covered with ice today.
We don’t remember the temperature to or from the outhouse, because it did us no harm. It was part of life.
Thankfully, for most of us, it seems our brains discard that info, or store it in a format only triggered when it is met or exceeded.
I remember that my pony tail froze once, but I don’t actually remember when, or the temperature, or if the rest of my body was cold.
Kids are usually not all that phased about cold. If you were still a first grader at Eagle Cave, you probably wouldn’t have felt that cold. If a child has boots and warm socks, and some sweaters and a decent coat, and leggings or warm pants, their minds are on snow balls and skating or pulling big icicles off the gutters.
Plus back in the day, people had woolen clothes for the kids to wear in the winter. Now we have all this polyester crap (or the newer thing, micro-fibered stuff) which doesn’t keep you warm in the winter and doesn’t keep you cool in the summer either. Yet it gets advertised as being so cozy and comfy.
There is a reason Janet and I moved to Texas as soon as we could. Gulf Coast Texas, not that Panhandle part. (There is nothing between Amarillo and Canada but a barbed-wire fence. That blew down years ago.)
Hmmm. I’ve just started reading North Dakota’s Geologic Legacy by John P. Bluemle (2016) in order to learn more about the state where I was born. He makes the point that there is nothing to stop weather that blows in from the north or the south. Maybe somebody should put that barbed wire fence back up.
In his remarkable book “Endurance”: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage to the Antarctic, Alfred Lansing describes the experiences of the stranded Antarctic explorers as they make their incredible trip home following the wreck of their ship Endurance.
One detail that stuck with me was the description of the daily routine of these men, who would crawl into their sleeping bags each evening covered with snow and ice. By morning, their bodies would have melted the ice, and they’d wake up relatively warm, but wet. They would then climb out of their sleeping bags and, in wet clothes and the brutal sub-zero Antarctic wind, find a private place behind an icy drift to attend to their physical needs.
Here in upstate New York, I let the house get down to 58° each night, and feel like I’m roughing it.
I remember how chilblains felt. But I don’t remember the cold that caused them.
What is weird is how you get used to the temperature and how quickly you get un-used to it, even though you’ve been through the change of seasons 50 times. Forty-five degrees Fahrenheit feels like you are in a tropical paradise if it’s March but feels like the frozen gates of hell in September.
Your comment sent me back in time. I’m actually feeling teary. It’s been 60 years ago . . I remember walking back from ice skating at a pond a mile or so from our house.
It’s been 60 years since my toes have felt like marbles in my boots and I stood on the register above the coal-fired furnace in my childhood home.
See, I triggered your memory…that memory of cold has not been haunting you each winter for the past 60 years?
Oh yes, Jules. I’ve always reflected on those childhood winters. It’s just that as the horizon draws closer, those memories – even of marble-cold toes – become more precious. The thought of being that cold at my age – is not just haunting – it’s daunting :)
Oh me too. I don’t like being cold. I’m a big baby when it comes to cold.
Let’s agree to think warm spring thoughts!
I read somewhere that Australia had 117F reading and wombats were falling out of the trees….that could be a bad sign for our summer –
As far as I’m concerned, Shackleton experienced a true miracle on that journey. By all rights, everyone on that expedition should have died, not lived to return home.
Oh, me too! Does anyone (not in the UK) get chilblains any more? Did they ever?
Hey, makes perfect sense to me.
Not here, there are no wombats in KY. We’re completely safe from falling wombats.
58!!??? That only works in the summer. It’s amazing psychology. The colder it is outside, the warmer I need it inside.
I don’t see how most folks could get them between the door and the car and/or between the car and the store/office. Of course some younger folks still get outside to romp in the snow but they seem to have greater resistance to such things than adults do. And they generate a lot of body heat with their frenzied activity. So, no I don’t hear about such things over here in KY. Now in Minnesota, who know? Calling @lileks .
I notice that same effect regarding hot weather here in Calif. The first week when temps hit 84-85, I think I am living inside an oven. Then the heat soars to 98 to 102, and once it drops back down to 85, I think that 85 is normal.
I remember when we first came to America telling my family that Americans were tough because they could tolerate extreme cold from their a/c in Summer, and extreme heat from their furnaces in Winter.
I took me a while to figure out that the children of friends did not have rosy cheeks like our kids because they were not exposed to weather. Indeed one insisted that his kids wore hats and coats inside our house even though we had cranked up the heat as much as we could bear, 65F.
So far I haven’t needed to wear socks with my sandals here in Ohio. Though the snow melting into a puddle in the toe box of my sandals while I’m kneeling during Mass is kind of yucky.