The Long Winter
We can pretend a wee bit that we are the Ingalls family during the long winter. A wee bit, of course. We've experienced this last patch of real winter weather without our 21st (actually it's from the 20th) century furnace. The furnace is broken with three separate problems that our heat and air guy tells us spells n-e-w f-u-r-n-a-c-e.
We've all agreed we are very grateful to be living in this century and that we don't have to twist hay to throw in the stove because the coal and the firewood have run out. We are thankful our wheat bag is never empty, the salt pork hasn't run out, and we have enough kerosene to keep the light.
Of course we are not suffering, at all. We have a warm upstairs. It's the downstairs unit that is broken. And we have nifty little plug-in heaters to keep us warm when we have to be downstairs where it is a balmy 50 degrees, not the 40 below it was during those North Dakota blizzards of 1860.
We marvelled at Pa's wisdom of how modern conveniences had spoiled them. Coal, kerosene and trains were nice ... when they had them.
It is a long winter when the train won't come til Spring and the kerosene, coal and wheat are gone.
We'll get our new furnace on Monday though.
Posted in: on Friday, February 02, 2007 at at 3:20 PM
