Preparing for Polar Air

In a log cabin the logs get chilled all through in deep winter and then radiate cold -- indoors. That's my least favorite part of living here. Then I use my extreme-temp strategies. There's no gym, church, coffeehouse, library, club meeting or anywhere to escape to this year, so:

 

• Wear over-the-knee wool socks and long underwear under fleece-lined sweats, and maybe leg warmers and headgear. Indoors. I do mean it.
• On the weekend, place the closed car or other vehicle in the sun (if there's sun). Let the sun heat it up real good. Go nap in it. Warms your bones.
  
  
• Eat higher-calorie food to sustain body weight. It is not healthy to "get thin" because of cold temperatures.
  
• Curtain or shade all windows, or tablecloth your window, as I did this morning. If possible, tape the curtain's edges to the walls. Science says a curtained window loses 25 to 35 percent less heat. 
• Take vitamins and eat citrus daily. I like water with lemon. Here are lovely honeybells (cross between grapefruit and tangerine. Their skins "unzip" very neatly).
• Make and consume soups and herbal teas and lots of water. That sounds counter-intuitive. It isn't. Single-digit temps and indoor heating bring very dry air, dry air means dry and vulnerable membranes. Intersperse intake of caffeine drinks or alcohol with glasses of water.
  
• Set and patrol mousetraps because furry company is likely to creep in seeking shelter.
• For the duration, forget economizing. Use all resources.
  
• Leave a stream of water running in the slop sink so the pipes won't freeze.
• Exercise will warm cold extremities.
• Find an active, distracting household task: Ironing, long recipes, repairs and alterations, dusting, cleaning the oven or the ceiling fan blades, shoe and boot care, and so on.
• Don't complain or call people to complain that you need spring or summer. Move to Florida if Missouri's too much of a challenge for you.
  

My Retirement Party

I cannot resist a sign saying "Pond" with an arrow pointing the way; "pond" is one of my favorite words. It snowed yesterday, about two inches. It snowed four weeks ago, two inches. That is this winter's total snowfall. Today, a quartz-crystal, unworldly January day, about 31 degrees, I took my first real exploratory hike in many moons.

After months of calculations and arrangements today was the first day, after 50 years, I no longer have to work, although I will continue to work because I like it. So I'm not "retired," but merely began drawing on retirement savings, easing up a little. My feelings were quite new and mixed, as if this were not an end but a beginning. I phoned my sister to sort it out. She said God's timing is perfect.

"The money should be in your account at the end of the business day," the money man had said, music to my ears. Back at home, lunch. Then what? Ideally I'd give a party. Can't in a pandemic, and if you live on rural roads no guests will come to a party in January anyway. Yet I desired to do something special. Chose a hike at a once-familiar place not visited for more than a year, maybe two. Thought as I trekked about how a year from now I may fish in Missouri without a license. After half a mile of beaten trail mine were the only footprints in the snow. I saw the word "Pond" and the arrow and walked uphill to a pond with the sun thawing a thumbprint into its ballroom of ice.

It remained only to give myself a retirement gift. What I have (embarrassingly) wanted ever since somebody gave me an insanely delightful three-month subscription 20 years ago was a full subscription to Fruit of the Month Club. I couldn't think of any reason why this would be bad.

For the Love of My House

The Divine Cabin, love of my life, is not worth salvaging or renovation. Experts have told me this. It's expensive to maintain an 80-year-old largely neglected rental house and yard. I don't grudge the landlord's lack of interest in regular maintenance. They'll come running for anything serious, like the furnace out or a fallen tree blocking the lane. That's better than some.

Before

Yet intuition kept bothering me as I worked in the cabin's "office" and watched through its window the season's first ice storm, followed by snow. I'd been noticing a thick (can't get your arms around it) dead oak next to the house with a very long and hefty horizontal branch -- the tree's only remaining branch -- suspended about 20 feet precisely over the "office" roof. If ice snapped it off, it'd bring a neighboring tree's branch down with it, or the whole tree might fall, for a total of thousands of pounds of momentum to splinter one third of my roof and house.

If the landlord then said the damage was not worth repairing, I'd have to move, breaking both my heart and pocketbook. But they don't do (much) preventive maintenance, and right now the landlord is short-handed and their chief guy is in quarantine. Still, I know it's perilous to ignore a nagging intuition. Sometimes things are up to me.

It's hollow. On the right is my sneaker.

Although as a tenant I could have chosen to "Miss Ann" the landlord and make pestiferous demands for "Now, before the next snowstorm," I elected to hire and pay for a local tree service, called "Get 'Er Done," for removal. The estimate was yesterday. They'd need a lift (pictured above left, in action) and ropes and a crew. For me, peace of mind and disaster averted would be worth the money that by Divine grace I have earned and will spend for the love of my house.

So today after they started sawing, the tree team's boss knocked at my door and told me to come and see how rotten/hollow the branch was (see photo at left) and said they don't know how it hadn't fallen already.

After they sawed the tree trunk into pieces, stacked them, and left, I counted the tree rings: approximately 75. That places its genesis in the year 1946 or so. I am grateful to have shared 20 years living alongside of it, and for my intuition and my job.

How to Be Happy Despite an Extended Winter

March with snow on the ground, 17 degrees, wearing fleece robe over fleece clothing in the house, clutching cups of hot drinks, thinking of deceased folks etc. = misery, unless you must, no buts about it, take the car in for the fuel-pump recall, plus regular oil change and tire rotation -- "How long will this take?" "Hour and a  half, two hours" -- and decide that today the wait will be fun.

Realize via Google Maps that a liquor superstore known for wines is .3 miles from the car dealer, and toddle there on icy sidewalks and across strip-mall parking lots. Spend 45 minutes in two aisles each of a hundred linear feet of cabernets and red blends, like a library, organized by price, telling self "You can have only one," and choosing a staff-recommended Languedoc. On the way back, decide that a person who loved themselves would buy themselves lunch. At a hole-in-the-wall BBQ I have a fine pulled pork sandwich with pink applesauce and a Pepsi.

Upon return, the car service is finished. Realize the car now picks up like a swan when  in "eco" mode -- they fixed it! Drive my personal rocket ship to another store where before the holidays I bought a startlingly good random red wine, hoping they might have one bottle left, and miraculously they have restocked it and I buy 3 bottles. Cheerfully drive home, not hungry, with payload of wine thinking of happy and friendly occasions. The sun is out and it doesn't feel cold or windy now.

I Heart Frozen Mix

In months without foliage the bedroom window shows me the T-intersection below the cliff and about 200 yards away--dangerous during the best of times because from both ways the county highway curves and comes sharply downhill. On snowy/icy/sleety nights when hearing the snowplow thundering my way to shear snow from the road, I get up to see its lashing yellow lights briefly pass then disappear, thinking: Someone's taking care of us. And someone is hoping he comes home safely and soon.

No one else here voluntarily drives in this weather, so during snows a vast silence is broken only by the plow, usually. Tonight's big wet flakes the TV weatherman called "hamster-sized" (welcome to Missouri), ticked the roof like cornflakes. I went out to take photos with my newish phone, not realizing its camera had automatic flash until back indoors when I saw how the camera flash captured the trails of falling snowflakes, a phenomenon otherwise invisible.

This is the first real winter in several years, with snow days (four or five now) and frozen mix -- my favorite. It really is like driving in that frozen mix of peas, cubed carrots and green beans you buy in the freezer section -- my worst nightmare. So I appreciate the plow and like watching it come up one side of the road and down the other. Beats seeing ambulances and cops converge at our crossroads as happens about once every season. I am told that when I was a kid I did not want to play with dolls but with trucks.

Eat Your Heart Out

Once again to the rescue on a special day: my neighbor, Terri, with more baking. There were two more cookies before this photo got taken. Now there are even fewer.

On the warmer days (60-70 degrees) the air is like spring water and I saw stubs of daffodils poking up near a tall building where the earth was a bit warmer. On the colder days (18 degrees, snow) we have mass regional stir-craziness with everybody retreating into their favorite vice because a genuine, hat-and-gloves wringing-wet winter such as we are having, while formerly normal, is now unusual and distressing, we have had several "snow days" and slippery roads, and this year Lent and its fish fries are still weeks in the future.

It's Not January, Unless

Fern vs Ice? No, Fern and Ice together.

.  .  . unless, on a rather temperate January day in the Divine woods, among its cliffs, ravines, craggy dropoffs, brooks and pools, placing myself in unnecessary physical danger, I crawl, sidle and mud-slide toward a vantage point to photograph a frozen waterfall hoping for a photo more eloquent than most. I feel a responsibility because no one else will ever see these moments in rugged eastern Missouri nature unless I photograph and share.

Beneath the ice, fresh water comes to life.

I love this time of year, anticipating spring's potential, so I chose as my theme "signs of spring."Although it's a bit early yet, an optimist will see what she or he wants to see -- and find it.

Herbs in January

In January, hunting green herbs seems like an oddity and luxury, but every winter here the land grants me free chives -- unfailingly, and as much as I can scissor. Often the clumps are sticking up through snow, the only greenery in a black-and-white landscape. Today there's no snow, and hunting (I needed two ounces) felt like heaven.

They grow wild mainly in areas where the soil is disturbed by mowing, and seem to like slopes, the wetter the better.

How generous these onion-grass plants are! In winter this grass enhances a butter sauce for fish or gets sprinkled on carrot soup. By mid-March, pinkish-white bulbs have formed underground: spring onions, which I pull and use like scallions, both the green and the white, and while I do that I awaken worms and nightcrawlers whom I'm delighted to have as company. In early autumn when the onion "heads" are formed, I can harvest their tendrils, which are garlicky.

Some people want to, and fight to, clear their yards of onion grass! Why?

Women's Wear Nightly

JEFFERSON COUNTY, Mo. - The un-insulated bedroom, a 1969 addition to the Divine Cabin, presents a heating challenge typically addressed by a heated mattress pad, flannel sheets, a space heater and inch-thick insulation taped over the single-pane windows, but on harsher nights those are not enough, and one must, in addition, consider one's jammies.

Besides being sleepwear, jammies are often worn all morning, or down to the mailbox, topped with a parka. Stone-washed in well water at least weekly, by April the pair that was new in autumn is rags, or only one-half of the jammie set survives, as with the blue-striped Lanz pajama bottoms pictured here smartly teamed with a coral-colored long-sleeved Calida henley top for up-to-the-minute bedtime fashion flair, both in pure cotton.

Lanz of Salzburg and Calida of Switzerland sell quality Euro-jammies and undies able to survive this lifestyle for several winters. The Lanz jammie pants are four winters old, the coral Calida top, five. One multi-colored striped Calida nightie has shared the wearer's bed for three winters and she looks forward to more. After its annual laundering it smells divine! From the label Joe Boxer, sold at Sears and K-Mart and sewn in Bangladesh, this season's statement jammies feature stylized melon- and cherry-colored hearts, and the buttons on the top are hot pink glitter, and one can only imagine the thoughts of the workers in the sweatshop in Bangladesh.

Observers have responded to the heart-print jammies thus: 1) "That looks like a clown suit" and 2) "Hearts all over, soooo cute!" What people think and say about your leisurewear is so important! Never think it's beneath the fashion radar!

"There, There, Dearie"

It's 5 below 0 outside -- aggggh! Ireland left with me a fresh appreciation for hot drinks. Tea there, very necessary, arrived always at the table in an adorable personal-sized teapot (made of restaurant-type steel) and in the hotel room was a super-express electric hot-water pot. Unlike the rip-roaring rush of coffee, tea's caffeine boost is more like a pat on the hand: "There, there, dearie, don't carry on so."

I never had thoughts about tea or owned a teapot large or small, and back home explored again, with reason and delight, U.K. tea brands and the old-restaurant-ceramics frontier on eBay until I saw this personal teapot from Jackson China (Falls Creek, PA) stamped L7, July 1962, with a utilitarian shape and light cocoa-colored airbrush trim. Rinsing it and filling it (10-ounce capacity) with hot water and a teabag provides two cups, plus milk or cream, in my favorite 6-ounce restaurant-china cups, and the second hot cup is waiting right there and I don't have to get up for it. Most civilized.

Then I thought -- tea should be shared and I need another personal teapot for my company! It'll work for coffee too. From eBay I ordered another, same maker and shape, but with bright-green banding. It's on its way. The cup in this photo is from Shenango, date unknown. It's not a teacup but a coffee cup, but today I liked this shape's stability and thick heat-holding walls. Yesterday I took a walk. It was 9 degrees. I was back in 11 minutes.

Good Things About the Dead of Winter

• No bugs.
• No bug bites.
• Everyone else is flabby too.
• Heating pad for car seat.
• Tired of chocolate.
• No garden worries.
• Lengthening days.
• Hats to cover up unwashed or unstyled hair, parkas to cover unwashed and unironed clothes, etc.
• Big thick anorak-style hoodies with agricultural logos.
• Sitting in the rocking chair staring into space is okay.
• Hands encircling warm cups of coffee or tea.
• Citrus.
• Having trails all to yourself.
• No waiting at the pedicurist.
• People bake.
• Soups.
• No bell-ringers.
• Everyone buys lotto tickets without shame.
• No one is on your case to go out and have fun.