During the coldest part of any winter, I think back to one
winter when I was a very little girl…I’m guessing 7 years old.
My family, (father, mother, brother and me) lived in a house
that was built in the early 1900s to house farm hands. This is in the Wapping
section of South Windsor. The house had no insulation, single floors,
garage/cellar under the house, no central heat and it stood on a little knoll
with nothing to protect it from the wind. In the winter it could get quite
cold. My brother and I would come downstairs in the morning and stand on chairs
next to the big black stove to get dressed. Every fall, my father would buy a
crate of Macintosh apples and we would store them in the upstairs closet that
was open to both my bedroom and my brother’s.
One winter in particular I remember, for a few nights, we
couldn’t sleep upstairs. My father closed off the dining room so the heat from
the big black stove in the kitchen would, hopefully, warm the living room, too.
My brother, who was 11, and I slept on the couch, layered with blankets. We slept feet-to-face, and because he
was longer than I, his feet came closer to my face than mine to his. My mother
and father slept on the floor on a mattress my father brought down from
upstairs.
There were many cold winters before we had central heat, but
this one is the one I remember most. Maybe that is the reason, to this day, I
like a cold bedroom. I sleep with an open window all year round (except heat
waves)…the degree of open depending on the outside temperature.
On last night’s weather, it was pointed out that February
16, 1943, had the record low temperature of -24°. That had to be the winter I
remember.
Keep in mind, I would have been in the third grade by this
time and we walked to school…one mile away. And, no, it was not up hill both
ways! The older kids were instructed to keep an eye on themselves and the
younger kids in case of frostbite.
I don’t know if this was the same winter or not, but one
winter we had so much snow the Army tanks went down Clark Street side by side
clearing the drifts. That was quite a sight! The Army was bivouacked in a field not
far from our house. That would make it during WWII, so 1943 would also make
sense.
Ah,
those were the days.
