Jackie Wells-Fauth
Okay, everyone who contemplated moving to the tropics this week, raise your hand. (Give me a moment while I raise mine.) For those of you who didn’t, you’re just not thinking creatively…you must be too cold!
I know that into every winter, a little cold must fall, but this week, it has verged on the ridiculous. I do love living in South Dakota, but I admit I don’t handle the ultra-cold too well. It disrupts everything and I can’t wear my short-sleeved shirts. This is a tragedy!
I am poorly equipped to handle all this cold. I had to switch from my afternoon iced tea to hot tea and I absolutely cannot face eating cold cuts in weather like this. It makes me want to curl up in a blanket and eat comfort foods like chocolate and doughnuts. Cold weather is bad for the body mass, but on the bright side, I’ve heard that the higher the body mass, the warmer I’ll stay!
Fortunately, we have the capability to have fires in our basement stove. Unfortunately, I’ve never been any good at starting fires. Roy does it well, but if I try, it never works. I’m reminded of the Jack London story “To Build a Fire.” The poor man was freezing and trying to get a fire going. When he finally succeeded, the snow from a tree overhead dropped and put it out. You just knew he was going to freeze to death then. I would not have taken as long to succumb to the weather!
I never have the luck to get a fire to start. I have tried everything from kindling sticks to all types of paper and I never even get an ember flickering, but I do get a lot of cold air coming down the pipe! So much for the comfort of a crackling fire—the furnace is on its own.
I try the mind over matter trick. It’s ten below outside, so I make sure to read the epic novel “Hawaii” and I eat pineapple while wearing a lei. I draw the line at doing the hula, however; the last time I tried, I put a hip out! Mind over matter didn’t work; I was still freezing.
Roy is not nearly as bothered by the cold. He was watching a football game this weekend where the football players were playing in the snow. They were slipping and sliding, and they had bare hands and arms in a snowstorm so thick that it was hard to see if the ball went between the goal posts in a field goal!
“How can you watch that stuff?” I asked, pulling my coat closer around my body as the snow changed to sleet and clanged off the helmets of the players. “It’s positively freezing my blood.”
“Well, I’m not there,” he replied, “and sometimes a game is more exciting when you don’t know from one minute to the next if they are going to go sliding into the goal line.”
After three hours of watching the blizzard of Philadelphia, I was relieved to have it over. Probably the LA Rams were too—I can’t imagine that’s their usual climate for play. They undoubtedly went back to their hotel rooms to thaw out and I removed one layer of my many layers of clothes.
Then, just like that, another game came on and guess what? More snow! I don’t enjoy football all that much anyway; I really don’t want to increase the misery by freezing while I watch the game.
“Can’t we watch something else,” I whined as I put on another pair of socks—over my hands. “I am freezing and it’s obvious Buffalo is going to win.”
“You never know, anything can happen and that’s especially true when they are playing the game in the Arctic.”
Monday morning proved that football games in the snow are not the worst thing about cold. I did not set a single foot outside and I was still frozen, just looking at the thermometer. I kept waiting for it to get above zero, and it never did.
The dog went to the door and looked back as if to say, “I would like to go out now.”
“You don’t want to go out, trust me,” I told her.
She didn’t trust me, so I let her out and she made a complete about face and had her head back in the door before I could close it. Turns out that dog and I have something in common. Neither one of us enjoys the cold.
“Don’t worry, if I find a tropical island to go to…” I began, looking at her, “I’ll be sure to send you a postcard with something warm on it.”
Stay warm all of you—spring must come sometime!
dropsinthewell 