“Mr. Emerson …tells me that he saw boys skating on the Mississippi, and on Lake Erie and on the Hudson and has no doubt they are skating on Lake Superior. Probably at Boston he might have seen them skating on the Atlantic.”
–Henry David Thoreau, February 1856
I’m no fan of winter in general, but by February I start to get really cranky and despair of ever being warm again. I feel like parts of me slowly turn to stone throughout the day. And that’s living in a modern (well half of it’s modern) house with central heat. I cannot imagine living in the old drafty un-insulated part of my house (or anyone else’s) when the only heat came from a small fire that you couldn’t set to automatically come on at 6 a.m. on weekday mornings. A fire is cheery and great to warm your hands over, but it doesn’t heat a room well, especially on a windy day. In the Gunshop at Jerusalem Mill, I’ve cooked over even great big fires full of hot baking coals and still been able to see my breath when I stood up. It makes for an interesting afternoon. If I had to live with it all the time, it would make for a miserable life.
So we’ve established that I’m a cold wimp. People who enjoy winter sports like skiing and ice skating most likely are not. And neither were people who wanted to survive in those draft un-insulated houses without thermostats. Annapolis resident William Faris kept a detailed record of his daily activities during the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. His entries for February 1801 are typical – “a snowey night and morning,” “a cloudy, snowey drisley day”—then there are a few mentions of “a fine day” and he’s out digging up and replanting bushes. Then it snows for two days straight and we have several days where he just says “ a clear cold day” and he starts sowing peas, cabbage and lettuce. And then it snows some more.
He wasn’t waiting for spring. He worked the garden whenever he had the chance. Faris was a silversmith, clockmaker and tavern keeper, among other things. His primary business was not farming the land. Yet he was out there preparing beds and planting in all sorts of weather.
Gardening was a bit of a hobby for him, and that might explain his enthusiasm for working the wintry soil. But I think it really shows that people in those days were much tougher when it came to tolerating cold. Not once does he whine in his diary about scraping the ice off his carriage windshield (but I’m actually not sure he kept a carriage, so maybe that’s it.) No, the reason he didn’t complain is that he learned to put up with the cold vagaries of the season.
I should do the same. Spring will arrive eventually, it always does. Well, except in years like 1816 where the ash from a major volcanic eruption disrupts the flow of sunlight to the planet…just how bad were those eruptions in Iceland anyway?
Anybody have any tips for surviving the late winter of our discontent?
You do better than I do — I get cranky about mid-January. We heat with a wood stove, so I have some small sense of what the previous generations had to do to stay warm in the winter. But I don’t think they were able to kick on the oil heat while waiting for the wood stove to heat the room. I go to the YWCA and exercise/run/swim to make up for the outdoor time I miss in our (too long) winter.
I despise Winter all around, so I would be of no use with the tips for surviving! LoL! From the first day of Winter until the First day of Spring, I stay in a funk! 🙂 But, reading generally helps me cope with much of anything! 🙂
Thanks for posting this!
~M~
True, I need to remind myself that winter is the time I allow myself to ignore stuff and read a lot more. Maybe I’m extra cranky because I just finished a good book and haven’t allowed myself to open another one yet. I think I can fix that!
I used to be the same way. I grew up in the midwest and would get so depressed by the end of winter. Now I live in TX and I actuallly miss it. (I know you’re hating me right now.) Now I get really sick of the long hot summer! After about 6 weeks of over 100 degree temps, I get REALLY cranky!! Maybe you should come visit me in the winter and I’ll come visit you in the summer. LOL!!
Blessings
Michelle V
I think your a little crazy! I grew up in Chicago and thank my lucky stars that winters here in Maryland are shorter and milder (well, okay, I don’t thank them that much or I wouldn’t be cranky, right?). At least here when it snows they close everything so you can either go play in it or stay inside and skip school and meetings and practices. In Chicago, you just had to get up earlier to shovel. And summers in the suburbs got pretty hot and humid, too. Nice a climate for wimps like me!
The ending was perfect! I confess to being a tad biased as a Steinbeck fan.
I think the snow is beautiful. I long to live where I can actually see a true change of seasons.I live in Arizona, smack dab in the middle of the Sonoran desert. Many of the same things you mention are equally true here during the summer. I couldn’t imagine living this close to Hell without air conditioning. At times it feels like there is no escape from even the smallest amount of radiant heat.
The old joke is, “But it’s a dry heat.” Send me some snow, please?