I ventured out - it looked so sunny - walking 2 blocks to mail some letters and 2 blocks back. But by the time I reached our house again, thankful I hadn't slipped on the ice, my fingers were curled up in the palms of my gloves to keep warm!
Now as I sit here indoors - looking at the sunny snowy scene through my living room window - I'm thankful to be WARM again!
When I walk outside in the cold - like I did this morning - my mind invariably turns to the early pioneers who first inhabited this area. Many had never experienced winters as long and COLD as they found here. To me, the fact that they survived in their simple log homes - and stayed - is truly amazing.
Would I have had the fortitude?!
Then I think back to when I was 6 - the year I lived in Kingman, Alberta. A wooden stove heated the small 2-room "teacherage" the school provided for my mother, their home economics teacher.
This picture - taken on my 7th birthday - is the only one we have of it. Our tiny home had no bathroom or running water. We had to go outside to a black-handled pump, bring in buckets full of water, heating it on the stove, to wash and cook.
I remember having to wear long underwear all winter long to keep warm...
Embarrassed, I didn't want any of my classmates to know, so my mother folded the legs carefully so that the extra bulk was hardly noticeable through my thick brown stockings. (Maybe everyone wore them - but kept it a secret!) I think I even wore my "long-johns" when I went to bed!
(You may have noticed that they had wooden sidewalks - not cement ones - in small prairie towns back in those days!)
That's as close to pioneer life as I ever got! I remember my mother warming my clothes in the morning by hanging them over the open oven door - and how I rushed to put them on before they cooled off! But one thing I don't remember is ever being really cold!
How did they do it?!
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