When the winter months come in upstate NY., the weather can change very suddenly. I saw large dark clouds looming over in the western part of the sky. Soon the wind picked up and little snow flurries began to fall out of the sky.
Next the wind stiffened and now the snow was coming down hard, looking to me as if it was falling sideways and the wind turned very cold.
I'm grateful that we had already nailed some tar-paper along the bottom of the house and stacked big rocks on the bottom edge of the black tar-paper. There were bails of straw left over from the fall harvest and we pulled a few of them up to where we hade placed the big rocks.
Scattering the straw over the big rocks, the straw settled down between the big rocks. Now as the heavy snow was continuing to fall, the snow covered the straw and even drifted up against the tar-paper.
So when we went into the deep cellar we could no longer feel that cold wind from the west. We had stacked a lot of good dry wood along the other side, against the wall which was made out of just hardened dirt. Nothing like good old dirt to lean all that dry wood against and now it was time to start the furnace down in the cellar; first some chips of wood which were from the woodshed, nice and dry and just great for starting a little fire in the furnace.
Soon, those chips were blazing red flames, and it was time to throw a couple of pieces of that dry wood into the furnace and slowly they would catch fire and so one of us closed the door to the furnace and knew we could wait until after we milked out cows and did other chores, after a good supper, it was time to go back down into the cellar and open the furnace door and take a couple shovels of coal, throw them all around the embers of all that burning dry wood; that would last all night long. The heat came up through three open floor registers, and one open floor register that let some warm air into my upstairs bedroom.
Early in the morning I could hear my grand father moving about, putting on his winter long johns, his overalls, and finally his heavy shoes. I would roll out of my bed and notice that my room was so cold I would shiver when I dressed in my warmest clothes I had, slip on a pair of boots, and quickly tip-toe down the stairs (didn't want to wake up me grand mother yet) and then hurried out to our barn, opened the barn door and when I went inside that old barn, it was so nice and warm where the cows had slept all night long.
By the time we finished milking the cows and finishing up our other chores, we would both walk through the woodshed and taking off our boots/heavy shoes, we went inside to the smell of hot coffee, seeing my grand mother up and busily fixing our breakfast. Our kitchen was small, but in addition to the wood cooking stove, there was a small table, my grand parents sat facing each other, and I sat down at the bottom of that kitchen table. The floors in that old farm house had settled do much, that were I sat down to eat, my chair was much lower than my grand parents chairs. But I still was able to sit up straight and eat some toast and cooked oat meal. I poured real milk on my bowl of oat meal and then sprinkled some brown sugar on top of it all. Taking my spoon I would stir the brown sugar, milk and oat meal together, now that was real good eating; hot, sweet and enough energy to keep me all morning.
About 7:30 in the morning a yellow school bus pulled up in front of that old farm house, I would climb on and away we would go, down to school in Groton, New York,
With a paper bag filled with a couple of molasses cookies, a couple slices of home-made bread...perhaps someone would give me part of the pint-sized carton of milk they some times did, they couldn't finish all of it. I never felt hungry nor embarrassed when the town kids would laugh at me (we didn't have a nickel to buy that pint-sized carton of milk) but that was just fine by me, I just smiled at them and finished eating my lunch.
Looking back on those early years of my life, those memories of how we all just kept doing what we were doing, always bowed our heads for a few words of thanksgiving, and usually smiled a lot because we just knew that up the road there were some folks who didn't have it as good as we did.
No, life isn't about how well off we are in terms of money and fine foods, it's more about memories like these which keep me thankful for the simplicity of poor farm folk, and to think of the generations before them, I just can't imagine how they managed to stay alive; but they did because my grand parents also had grand parents.
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