Well Bottom Blues

Outside it was minus 41 farenheit, ambient, in the bright, white night. Inside it was 1910 Craftsman all original except the electric stove and water heater circuit, the rest cloth hung from glass posts.

You could measure in hands how much horsehair was left in the frigid wall, between seven and ten. The windows were hand poured with all the wrinkles and bubbles. The storms were solid wood, each with a brass number custom built matching its handcrafted window.
Every Fall I would climb my fireman-high extension ladder and lean way back to hang them from the brass hooks on top and pray I would not fall.

Two tanks in the basement, a good locomotive boiler taken together, to hold the oil to warm us through the winter. When I said hell yes go ahead and top them both off I found no one had done that for who knows how long as the oil spilled out the floats at top onto the floor. I’m don’t remember how many bags of cat litter it took to soak it up, and I’m pretty sure dumping all that in someone else’s dumpster was a capital offense in liberal Minnesota.

I bought a used Monkey Ward snowblower and eventually discovered one of the tangs that held the drive belt on were gone so I was always having to put it back but not before I learned that, yes, your mini maglite can stick to your tongue if you hold it in your teeth at those temperatures. I hadn’t thought about it in June, but we had a sunken driveway between a stack of stout timbers, and our driveway was the first one the plow would reach as it came around from the prior block without interruption with a full load of snow. This is how I learned the use of an adze.

That was my first year at 45° north latitude, halfway to the North Pole, in transit from Washington DC and eventually back to New Orleans. I wasn’t going to be defeated. When I was a young man in a hot clime I read every word I could find on polar exploration. My boss told me she could imagine me sitting in a room with no air conditioning under a slow ceiling fan beaded with sweat reading of Scott, Franklin, and Shackleton.

There is magic in that weather. There’s a sound on a windless night with light snow that I think might have something to do with static electricity either from the fresh light snow or the settling snow on the ground but it’s a gentle crackly hiss and fascinating. The dikes as they called the levees in Fargo were as high as ours on the Mississippi to contain the surge of snow melt every spring. They made excellent sledding hills where they faced the park so my children could screech in delight until momentum failed. I help my friend, an outdoor guide, build his website and he gifted me a pair of bentwood, animal skin woven snowshoes. I had to give up the original leather ties for some modern quick release ones. I would cheerfully go out on a beautiful windless 10° day to crunch through the snow.

I learned the hard way not to leave a hose connected to an outdoor spigot when a pipe in my wall froze and flooded half the basement. Before I could go out and take mine off in my rental here in New Orleans, the landlord texted me to say he’s takien it off himself. I think tomorrow morning or the next I’ll test myself and see if I can still make it from the door to the garbage can and back in my pajamas and boots. Not that I’ll need the boots mind you, but I used to and I want to see if I still can