Cold Weather Memories

As a child I do not think I noticed cold, heat, wet or wind. Most kids do not. We were living in Jerome in a very lightly insulated “company house” rented from Phelps Dodge and had only a coal oil stove for heat. It sat in the living room and did not really heat the whole house. Mom did close off some rooms and sometimes used the oven in the range early in the day. Even out at Camp Wood where it snowed quite a lot and we lived in a teeny camp trailer, I don’t recall being very troubled, no matter what the weather. But I was not even ten years old.

Winter Corrals

Along in my teens that changed, especially once I had livestock chores to take care of. Tramping out to distribute hay and crack ice on water troughs really made one aware of the winter. Then as I began to have to ride daily to visit and care for animals in several locations, it really hit me upside the head. I came to hate cold and wet days and also to dislike the wind that often came with such weather. Wind made the critters nervous and often a bit more difficult to handle and from the height of a critter’s back, I’d be chilled to the bone. 

By then we lived in a little brick house where we had an old ‘box wood’ stove in the living room and a propane heater in the kitchen which we ran at times. Feeding that old stove became a task almost as demanding as the hungry horses, mules and burros. We made many treks up to Mingus Mountain where Dad had taken out some mining claims and once planned to set up a hunting cabin and possible summer hang-out place. When we took the ‘short cut’ which was an unpaved mountain road that went up the mountain’s east side, we had a few scary times negotiating the twisted and often partly washed out track with a truck and trailer. A time or two we got stuck in mud or snow, too.

After the big fire tore through that area in 1956, we harvested a lot of dead pines and some oak and juniper as well. I can remember many a day spent hearing the chain saw roar and hustling logs and poles down to the pickup and trailer or later to the old flatbed Ford that was our stock truck. Once you got it home and unloaded there was more work to cut logs into stove length pieces—about 12-15 inches as I recall-- and split the bigger ones to smaller sizes which fit in the stove and burned better.

Reluctant Snow Bunny

When I was riding a lot, daily after I finished school, I’d often come in at dusk when the chores were done and get back in the corner behind the stove. The plastered walls reflected the heat back but it still took a long time until the cold was finally driven from my bones. I would sit until my jeans were nearly smoking! Before I got too cold again, I’d crawl into bed and curl up tight under so many blankets I felt like I was going through the wringer on Mom’s old Maytag washer.  Very slowly as my body heat spread to a larger area, I might partly uncurl but rarely showed much more than my nose out of the blankets.

Snowy Flagstaff

Of course I spent four years in Flagstaff after that, two years living in dorms on the NAU campus and two more in an apartment off campus where I had to walk several blocks to get to classes. I had adequate clothes and good boots so it was tolerable but not always pleasant. In good southwest fashion the weather could change quickly. I recall one birthday (near the end of April) when I went down to campus in a new dress and nice pumps in a sunny morning only to come home that afternoon, soaked in snizzle (snow+drizzle) and almost blue with cold!

Add to that winters in Colorado from 1973 to 1977 and again from 2009-2011 and any snow bunny tendencies were totally erased. Actually there were not many to begin with. My parents had enjoyed skiing in New England the two years my dad worked at Raytheon near Boston during the war so they put me on skis a time or two at Camp Wood. No way! I did not enjoy dumping onto my bottom in cold wet stuff a lot since since I did not catch on to balancing on two slick sticks very well. I did not care for snow balls or even making a snow man.

To this day I am not fond of wet, cold and/or windy days. As I got older I recognized a worsening case of SAD that starts to bother me not long after the fall equinox and digs in ever deeper until about mid February. There are days I would much prefer to stay under the covers or at best snuggle in a comfy chair and keep coffee, cocoa or hot cider by my side while I read a good warming book!

Often October is dry, mild and near-perfect down here in the border areas of Arizona and New Mexico but some falls flash by in a jiffy and winter arrives with a plethora of gray, cold and dismal days. I fear this is going to be one of those times. While I cannot really begrudge the rain which is always needed in this frequently drought stricken region or even the snow, though I wish it would stay up in both altitude and latitude, I do not have to like either. At least I can be properly thankful I have no livestock to care for and I am no longer in Colorado. Other than getting the dogs out a time or two to do their business, I can stay inside and pretty much ignore any weather I do not like. Old age has its privileges!