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It Was So Cold . . .

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It Was So Cold . . . It’s a dangerous a hilarious combination: cold weather and liars. Okay, living in Arenzville and frequenting the local coffee table I get more exposure to really refined liars than most people. Add to that the fact that I grew up sitting around my Grandpa Bradbury’s feed store in Perry, a place where the old loafers would actually gather around an iconic potbellied stove and talk until closing time. Some cold weather stories seem to be a part of every community’s folklore, like the day it was below zero and a group of geese had landed on a local pond. One of the local wags fired a shotgun, the geese panicked and started flapping their wings, and as one the entire pond flew away. Yeah…sure. When I was young I actually believed that one. Now I just remind myself that I’m in Arenzville. One of our local German farmers came in last week to announce that while driving through town he’d seen two dogs stuck firmly to a fire hydrant. He was looking for volunteers to go pour hot water on the point of contact but didn’t get any takers. I’ve actually seen a few frigid temperature adventures, the most memorable one being when Triopia was playing in a state championship football game. I remember that I had a thermos of hot coffee between my knees and for the only time in my life I couldn’t hold my hands still long enough to get a drink. I finally gave up after my lap had been sufficiently soaked. But I was sitting next to a fellow from Chapin with a luxurious red beard. Somewhere mid-point in the second quarter of the game I turned to him and saw that his chin resembled a bright red ski slope. His breath had formed an absolute cascade of ice resembling something you’d see deep in the bowels of Meramec Caverns. One Arenzville sage told us of a wicked winter his family spent in the bottomland between here and Beardstown when he was a boy. He said that the family ran out of fuel and the roads were iced over. I should add that this guy hasn’t been believed in years, but he always livens up the coffee shop conversation. He told us that his mother wouldn’t allow the kids to use silverware for fear of the spoons and forks sticking to their tongues, the milk froze into ice cream before they could get it from the barn to the house, and that when they tried to hitchhike to town they had to hold up pictures of thumbs. He also mentioned something about the squirrels that winter throwing themselves onto electric fences. This is the same guy who often tells tales of mushrooms that he’s had to cut down with his chainsaw. He went too far when he told us about his uncle who went ice fishing in this weather, sat on the ice for too long and got “polar-oids.” We got up and left him when he started telling about his aunt who’d plugged her electric blanket into the toaster by mistake and kept popping out of bed all night. For years I believed my Grandpa Orr when he told about traveling from Perry to his house with his brothers in an open buggy when the thermometer hovered at ten below. He said that their words froze when they came out of their mouths and they had to wait to get home to throw the icy sentences into the fire and find out what everyone had said. There are some bright spots to the polar vortex. A Canadian manufacturer is producing something called a Texting Mitt, a very large set of gloves with a Plexiglas window that allows the owner to keep his hands warm while sending messages. This makes me feel better. I know folks who’d rather freeze to death than loose the ability to read their text messages. When most of the area schools called off classes due to zero temperatures this winter, many of my students complained that they were “bored to death.” They sat in their warm houses with televisions, computers, movies, their cell phones, and a fridge full of goodies and suffered terribly. These kids had obviously never had their milk freeze up on the way to the house or thrown themselves onto an electric fence for warmth. I can remember as a young boy crawling up onto my grandpa’s lap and asking, “What did they do, Grandpa? Those pioneers who loved in cabins with hardly any heat when it got this cold?” Grandpa took a thoughtful moment, the said, “Well . . . I think they pretty much died.” I guess it could be worse.