Cold Snap

I just got back from shutting off the heat lamp in the pump house. Cold weather in the high 20s gets my attention, but thanks to the kindness of neighbors, I am somewhat prepared.

When we first lived in this old house, we had no central heat. We had a iron woodstove, period. It occupied pride of place in the living room, right near the sofa.

The house was drafty, too. When winds came from the north, curtains on those windows would stand out away from the wall.

There was no insulation. House was built in the 1850s with an empty space between outer and inner walls. Mice love that space. Human feet could get cold quickly, so we used area rugs—and lap blankets when necessary.

My husband, Leon Hale, understood cold houses, having grown up in several. During his younger days, fires were banked every evening, and rebuilt in the morning. One morning he discovered the water in the glass on his windowsill had frozen solid overnight.

Back then, it could get worse. One of my favorite stories involves the new bathroom Hale’s family installed in a corner of the bedroom in an old frame house. The privy they’d been using was broken up for kindling when the new toilet arrived. Winter followed.

“Here came a double-jointed, four-engine blizzard...,” he wrote. “Water in the commode froze, and the tank shattered, and the toilet bowl cracked like the shell of an egg and divided itself into four equal parts.” (Texas Chronicles) That kind of occurrence tends to live long in memories. Whenever we left the Winedale place for Houston during cold weather, Hale would shut off the pump and drain the pipes.

Central heat and air changed all that. I think of our house in winter, now, with a thin aura of invisible warmth around it that protects pipes and adjacent vegetation. Azaleas, for instance, that survive many freezes uncovered.

I work in what used to be a porch on the south side of the house. Four picture windows encourage the sun to warm the space. It’s often too bright for me, really, and sometimes too warm.

We have a fireplace, as well, but it reveals my deficiencies as a homemaker. If we’d had a functioning fireplace during that Valentine’s Day freeze in 2021 I wouldn’t have been so frightened.

Note the word functioning. The fireplace itself works. It does draw—or did the last time we tested it. That would have been around fourteen years ago, I think. Because when we held a burning taper in the opening to the chimney, about twenty angry red wasps swarmed out.

The fact is that we’re coexisting here with numerous critters— squirrels in the attic, mice in the walls, summertime dirt daubers and scorpions. And red wasps whose colony in the north wall of the old house predates our ownership.

Living without pesticides, we take all that for granted in the daily way we experience so much of our unexamined lives. This is the reason why, as you get older, the time you’ve spent alive seems to have passed so quickly.

Occasionally, though, time breaks through the dailiness. Night before last as I unloaded the car at dusk, bubbles of coyote song drifted across our yard. And with it I flew into a recall— so brief—of an evening here in the 1980’s, sitting on the open porch and listening to what Hale called “goblin music.” Another of the natural sounds you can’t hear inside a house closed up and basking in central heat and air.

Readers can contact Hale at bfhale2017@gmail.com