Free Renewal 6 - Cold by Jf Perkins Page B

huddling by the wood stove in the living room of her home. If we didn’t go to the house, we never saw her. She said she couldn’t tolerate that kind of cold at her age.
    “Hey, folks. How goes life in the barn?” George asked some version of the same question every day.
    “Not too bad, George. How’s life in the house?” Dad’s reply never changed much either.
    “Well, to be honest, not too good. It’s okay by the stove, but the rest of the house is well below freezing. Martha’s having a tough time of it.”
    “Yeah, George. I can tell by the melt pattern on the roof that you are losing a ton of heat straight up,” Dad said.
    “It is an old house. Never had much in the way of insulation. I think some of it is just old newspaper.”
    “Well, George, I was going to talk about that same problem, from the other end.”
    “What do you mean?” George asked, a little defensively.
    “The hard fact is that we’re using too much wood. We can still go out and get more, but that’s going to become impossible soon. Of everything we are heating, the barn is the least efficient right now. We’re sending heat into space, but we’ve been working to fix that. Second least efficient is your house. With no real insulation, there’s no way to hold in the heat. A month from now, you and Martha may be lying on top of that stove to stay warm.” Dad accompanied his lecture with lots of hand gestures.
    “So what can we do?” George asked.
    “We can work hard to tighten up your house, but to be honest, making the barn efficient will be faster and easier. This may be a tough call for you, but I think you and Martha should move out here with us. That’ll be one less big stove to feed, more bodies to share warmth, and a basic consolidation of resources and effort. In the spring, you can just move back in.”
    “You think it’s going to get colder,” George said.
    “I think it’s going to get extremely cold,” Dad replied with a hard expression. “I’ve been tracking the temperature on your big thermometer since we moved in from the woods. If the general trend continues, we’re looking at North Pole conditions - fifty, maybe seventy below. If it gets that cold, a trip to the outhouse will be life threatening. I’m sorry, but there’s no way you will survive in the house. Even if we do everything right, it’ll be dangerous enough out here, with everyone living and working together.”
    George looked up into the shadows of the barn, then back to Dad. “Ok, David. I’ll talk to Martha.”
     
    Chapter 6 – 16
    My birthday was on December 2nd. Mom was doing her best to get a decent cake out of the wood-fired oven, and it wasn’t going well. Powdered eggs do not apparently lend themselves to a moist and delicious cake. The makeshift ingredients combined with the uneven temperatures in the oven began to drive my mom into a frustrated whirl of aggressive motion. This state was further exacerbated by the crowded conditions.
    The snows had finally come in mid-October. At first, it brought the same thrill that kids always get when snow falls, but it quickly became apparent that there was no playing in the snow. Then it kept snowing until everything outside became a vague white lump with never ending dark clouds. Anyone looking from a distance would have seen a blurry, dead land, only broken by three faint streams of wood smoke. More often than not, even the smoke was lost to the blizzard conditions. Dad had strung a triangle of rope from the barn to the outhouse to the well and back to the barn. There was a time almost every day when the rope was all that kept us from being lost in the unceasing storm.
    The good news with the snow was that every time the snowfall grew heavy, the outside temperature climbed. It was all relative of course, but it was bizarre to learn to feel the difference between twenty-five below and fifty below just by the icy bite on my four square inches of exposed skin. We all learned to hold our