WINTER CAME HARD that year. Just after Thanksgiving, the first big snow started with fat wet flakes the size of butterflies. They floated down lazily but were followed by smaller, drier flakes that kept coming for days. At first I loved winter in Welch. The blanket of snow hid the soot and made the entire town seem clean and cozy. Our house looked almost like all the others along Little Hobart Street.
It was so cold that the youngest, most fragile branches snapped in the frigid air, and very quickly, I started feeling it. I still had only my thin wool coat with the buttons missing. I felt almost as cold in the house; while we had the coal stove, we had no coal. There were forty-two coal retailers listed in the Welch phone book. A ton of coal, which would last most of the winter, cost about fifty dollarsincluding deliveryor even as little as thirty dollars for the lower-grade stuff. Mom said she was sorry, but there was no room in our budget for coal. We'd have to devise other ways to stay warm.
Pieces of coal were always falling off the trucks when they made their deliveries, and Brian suggested that he and I get a bucket and collect some. We were walking along Little Hobart Street, picking up pieces of coal, when our neighbors the Noes drove by in their station wagon. The Noe girls, Karen and Carol, were sitting in the backward-facing jump seat, looking out the rear window. "We're working on our rock collection!" I shouted.
The pieces we found were so small that after an hour we'd filled only half the bucket. We needed at least a bucket to keep a fire going for one evening. So while we made occasional coal-collecting expeditions, we used mostly wood. We couldn't afford wood any more than we could afford coal, and Dad wasn't around to chop and split any, which meant it was up to us kids to gather dead branches and logs from the forest.
Finding good, dry wood was a challenge. We trekked along the mountainside, looking for pieces that weren't waterlogged or rotten, shaking the snow off branches. But we went through the wood awfully quickly, and while a coal fire burns hot, a wood fire doesn't throw off much heat. We all huddled around the potbellied stove, wrapped in blankets, holding out our hands toward the weak, smoky heat. Mom said we should be thankful because we had it better than pioneers, who didn't have modern conveniences like window glass and cast-iron stoves.
One day we got a roaring fire going, but even then we could still see our breath, and there was ice on both sides of the windows. Brian and I decided we needed to make the fire even bigger and went out to collect more wood. On the way back, Brian stopped and looked at our house. "There's no snow on our roof," he said. He was right. It had completely melted. "Every other house has snow on its roof," he said. He was right about that, too.
"This house doesn't have a lick of insulation," Brian told Mom when we got back inside. "All the heat's going right through the roof."
"We may not have insulation," Mom said as we all gathered around the stove. "but we have each other."
It got so cold in the house that icicles hung from the kitchen ceiling, the water in the sink turned into a solid block of ice, and the dirty dishes were stuck there as if they'd been cemented in place. Even the pan of water that we kept in the living room to wash up in usually had a layer of ice on it. We walked around the house wearing our coats and wrapped in blankets. We wore our coats to bed, too. There was no stove in the bedroom, and no matter how many blankets I piled on top of myself, I still felt cold. I lay awake at night, rubbing my feet with my hands, trying to warm them.
We fought over who got to sleep with the dogsTinkle, the Jack Russell terrier, and Pippin, a curly-haired mutt who had wandered down through the woods one daybecause they kept us warm. They usually ended up in a heap with Mom, because she had the bigger body, and they were cold, too. Brian had bought an iguana at G. C. Murphy, the five-and-dime on McDowell Street, because it reminded him of the desert. He named the lizard Iggy and slept with it against his chest to keep it warm, but it froze to death one night.
We had to leave the faucet under the house dripping or the water froze in the pipe. When it got really cold, the water froze anyway, and we'd wake up to find a big icicle hanging from the faucet. We tried to thaw the pipe by running a burning piece of wood along it, but it would be frozen so solid there was nothing to do but wait for the next warm spell. When the pipe froze like that, we got our water by melting snow or icicles in the tin pan on the potbellied stove.
A couple of times when there wasn't enough snow on the ground, Mom sent me next door to borrow a pail of water from Mr. Freeman, a retired miner, who lived in the house with his grown son and daughter, Peanut and Prissy. He never turned me down outright, but he would look at me for a minute in silence, then shake his head and disappear into the house. When he passed out the bucket, he would give me another disgusted head-shake, even after I assured him that he could have as much water from us as he wanted come spring.
"I hate winter," I told Mom.
"All seasons have something to offer," she said. "Cold weather is good for you. It kills the germs."
That seemed to be true, because none of us kids ever got sick. But even if I'd woken up one morning with a raging fever, I never would have admitted it to Mom. Being sick might have meant staying home in our freezing house instead of spending the day in a toasty classroom.
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Another good thing about the cold weather was that it kept odors to a minimum. By New Year's we had washed our clothes only once since that first November snowfall. In the summer, Mom had bought a wringer washing machine like the one we'd had in Phoenix, and we kept it in the kitchen. When we had electricity, we washed the clothes and hung them on the front porch to dry. Even when the weather was warm, they'd have to stay out there for days, because it was always so damp in that hollow on the north side of the mountain. But then it got cold, and the one time we did our laundry, it froze on the porch. We brought the clothes insidethe socks had hardened into the shape of question marks, and the pants were so stiff you could lean them against the walland we banged them against the stove, trying to soften them up. "At least we don't need to buy starch," Lori said.
Even with the cold, by January we were all so rank that Mom decided it was time to splurge: We would go to the Laundromat. We loaded our dirty clothes into pillowcases and lugged them down the hill and up Stewart Street.