Free Winter Is Not Forever by Janette Oke

to get off my heavy choring boots. She licked at my hands, at my face, anywhere that she could get a lick in. I guess it seemed to her that I had been gone for a very long time.
    When I went to wash for supper, Uncle Charlie spoke softly from the stove where he dished up the food.
    “Your face looks a bit chilled, Josh. Don’t make the water too warm. You might have a bit of a frostbite there.”
    I felt my nose and my cheeks. They seemed awfully hard and cold. I heeded Uncle Charlie’s advice and pressed a cloth soaked in cool water up against them. Even the cold made them burn.
    Over the meal we discussed the storm and all I had done to try to prepare for it. I noticed that the woodbox was stacked high. Grandpa had been busy, too.
    “Looks like it could be with us for a while,” commented Grandpa. “Sky is awful heavy.”
    I didn’t know much about reading storms, and I hoped that Grandpa was wrong. One day of this was enough.
    We listened to the news on our sputtering radio while we warmed ourselves with coffee. The forecast wasn’t good. According to the man with the crackling voice, the storm could get even worse during the night and wasn’t expected to blow itself out for at least three days.
    I could sense even before I awoke the next morning that the radio had been right. The storm was even worse than the day before.
    When I went out to face the wind and the cold, the range cows were pushing tightly around the barn, bawling their protest against the storm. I knew that they needed shelter; I also knew that they could not all fit inside. The barn was reserved for the milk cows and the horses. I felt sorry for those poor animals. We really needed some kind of a shed to protect them against such storms. That’s one thing I’ll do first thing next summer, I vowed to myself.
    The next day was a repeat of the two that went before it.
    All day the wind howled. Then, near the end of the day the wind abated and the snow slackened. The temperature dipped another five degrees.
    Even in the farmhouse we were hard put to keep warm. Uncle Charlie lit a lamp and put it down in the cellar to keep Aunt Lou’s canned goods from freezing. We added blankets to our beds and set an alarm so we could get up in the night to check the fire.
    The next morning arrived clear and deathly cold. The water in the hand basin in the kitchen was skimmed with ice. I lit the lantern and started for the barn, hating the thought of going out to face the intense cold. My breath preceded me in frosty puffs of glistening white. Even the moon that still hung in the west looked frozen into position.
    Now that the wind had died down, I really had work to do. The animals outside hadn’t really eaten properly since the storm had begun. It had been just too hard to fight the wind. Now they stood, humped and bawling, hungry and thirsty, and nearly frozen to death.
    By the time the storm had passed and the temperature was back to normal again, we had lost three of the piglets, two of the older cows, and half a dozen chickens. Three cows had lost the lower portions of their tails to frostbite, and our winter supply of feed had already been seriously depleted. If the winter continued this way, we would find it difficult to continue feeding all of the stock. Even so, we fared much better than some of our neighbors. The storm had killed a number of the animals in some herds.
    As Christmas approached, I was eager to spend time with Aunt Lou and Uncle Nat. Little Sarah was sitting by herself and even attempting to pull herself up. And the opening of the Christmas gifts was, of course, even more fun with a baby in the house. We all had a gift for Sarah, and we took her on our laps and pretended that she was taking part in the opening of the present. We also pretended that she was excited about each new rattle or bib. She wasn’t; in fact, she liked the rustle of the wrapping paper better than anything else.
    I even brought Pixie with us. In the colder weather I