Donnie Johnston
COLD OLD DAYS
Occasionally I hear some old-timer remark, "It doesn't seem as cold now as it did when I was a child!"
Well, I guess not. Seventy years ago most people were living in uninsulated houses -- especially in the country -- and heaters (like radios) were extras on new vehicles.
Everyone gathered around a wood stove in the kitchen for the only "central heat" in the house, and likely as not a dry snow would blow through the cracks around windows and pile up onto the sills.
Now we turn the thermostat up to stay warm and walk 50 feet to our cars, some of which can be started and warmed while we are still in the house.
Old-timers will also often swear, "When I was a boy the snows would come knee-deep early in December and be on the ground when March came!"
Baloney! Maybe that happened in upstate New York or Winter Park, Colo., but not around here. Never since weather records have been kept is there documentation that snow -- even in patches -- stayed on the ground all the way from early December until the end of February.
They are right about the knee-deep part, though. But we must keep that statement in perspective, too. When you are 5 or 6, your knees are barely a foot off the ground. Yes, we have had plenty of snows that were a foot or more deep. To a little kid, that's deep stuff.
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2 comments:
Gonna need that insulation this winter. I had one of those uninsulated houses, in CA, and it was really cold in winter. So finally I called the insulation crew and put the money in the 100 year old house, changed all the windows to double pain and doors to insulated, much warmer.
Fortunately, I sold before the CA home market tanked :-)
When I was a kid, there was always at least one major snowfall before Halloween. I even remember one year we bundled up in snowsuits (no, our costumes didn't fit over them, despite the Canadian jokes) to go to a couple of neighboring farms in a snowstorm. I think we only made it to my aunt and uncle's.
By the time my kids were old enough for trick or treating, we were more likely to get rain than snow.
Did I mention I was a kid in the '70's, when we were supposedly heading for the next Ice Age?
Oh, and, as I write this, we're in the middle of a wind storm with blowing snow that's already killed one person.
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