PREPARING FOR WINTER

Some people believe winter arrives on December 21 or 22, depending on what the calendar says that year. But those of us who live in the upper Midwest know better. Here winter arrives as much as a month or so earlier. And while the official vernal equinox is March 20 or 21, it is a rare year that spring comes that early. Once winter arrives in the North, it settles in and is reluctant to leave.

My dad was not much for checking a calendar. As a farmer, he spent his life outdoors, learning to predict the weather by watching sunsets and wind direction and other natural signs. Some of the clues that winter was coming were subtle: the horses’ coats grew longer; our farm dog Fanny’s hair grew thicker. Others were sure predictors: the last flocks of geese winging their way south over our farm; the oak leaves turning from green to many shades of brown.

To survive winter on the farm required planning and preparation—lots of it. Everyone in the family had jobs to do, starting for my brothers and me when we were only three or four years old. As we got older, more jobs came our way. We spent the summer and fall growing, harvesting, and storing feed for the animals. We filled the haymows in the barn with alfalfa, clover, and timothy hay, filled the silo with corn silage, and shoveled full the grain bins in the granary with freshly threshed oats. The straw stack behind the barn grew ever taller, piled high with threshed oat straw for use as bedding for the animals that would spend long winter days in the barn. We shoveled the corn cribs full to the brim with cob corn that would later be mixed with oats and ground into cattle feed at the local grist mill.

In October we hauled the last of the garden produce into the cellar under the house—the remaining heads of cabbage, the last bushel of carrots, a pile of onions, several squash and pumpkins, and an ample supply of rutabagas. Ma made sure that the cellar shelves were filled with canned vegetables, fruits, jellies, and jams. During the war years, when sugar was rationed and nearly impossible to buy, we grew sweet sorghum, and Ma canned as much as ten gallons of the sweet liquid boiled down to a thick syrup. She would use the sorghum for everything from baking to spreading on pancakes. After the fall butchering, usually in early November, a smoked ham hung on the wall alongside the steps leading to the cellar. In the pantry, just off the kitchen, a huge crock of sauerkraut fermented, offering a reminder of its presence to any visitor to the kitchen.

The late-fall days, often cloudy, sometimes with a cold drizzle or even a daylong cold rain, grew increasingly dreary as daylight hours became shorter. The summer birds—robins and wrens, Baltimore orioles and catbirds, bluebirds and meadowlarks—left for warmer climes. On cool, clear nights we sometimes heard an owl call deep in the woods north of our house, a haunting sound on a dark October evening, when the talk at school was about Halloween and ghosts and goblins. Then, with Halloween past, winter waited just around the corner like a predator about to leap on its prey.

On a Saturday in late October, we dusted off the wood-burning heater that spent the summer gathering dust in the woodshed and hauled it into the house. The heater was a Round Oak brand, five feet high and half that in diameter, standing on legs that lifted it a foot or so off the floor. It was heavy and clumsy to carry, and Pa asked a couple of the neighbors, usually Bill Miller and Alan Davis, to help with the task. When I was old enough, I got in on that act. We slid two-by-eight planks under the stove and slowly carried the heavy beast across the kitchen floor and into the dining room. There we hefted it onto a metal sheet that would protect the floor. We carefully lined up the stove so the stovepipe would fit through the hole in the dining room ceiling. The stovepipe passed through the upstairs bedroom where my brothers and I slept, providing a hint of heat to our frigid room on its way to the brick chimney gracing the roofline of our house.

With the stove in place, Ma immediately began dusting it, removing the long summer’s accumulation of grime, trying to make the old stove look somewhat respectable so any city relatives who might stop by wouldn’t make a negative comment. Meanwhile, Pa opened the stove’s door, rumpled up some old newspapers, gathered a few sticks of wood from the kitchen wood box, and lit a fire. He wanted to be sure that everything was in working order, especially that the stovepipe was straight and true and that the smoke was going up the chimney and not gathering in the dining room.

“By golly, she’s workin’,” Pa said, and a smile spread across his face. Ma put out the cookies and coffee she had ready to thank Bill and Alan for their efforts, and the men hung around for an hour or so, talking and swapping stories before they left for their farms and their own late-fall work.

Next in line for winter preparations was banking the house. When our house was built, around 1900, little was known about insulation in house walls. The walls consisted of wood, lath, and plaster—sturdy, but with few insulating qualities. So like most of our neighbors, in late autumn we piled our own version of insulation around the house’s fieldstone foundation. First Pa hitched the team to the manure spreader, and my brothers and I forked it full of straw from the straw stack. Next Pa unrolled four-foot-wide black tarpaper and, with a hammer, tacked it along the bottom of the house, all the way around. He used shingle nails and long strips of wooden lath to hold the tarpaper in place. Then we piled straw against the tarpaper, three feet deep or so, hoping to prevent the worst of the winter winds from whistling around our feet. (Some of our neighbors banked their houses with horse manure, claiming that the manure not only kept out the wind but also created some heat. Ma wanted nothing to do with that approach—how would she explain to the city relatives that our house was surrounded by horse manure?)

When we finished banking the house, we covered the front door with a piece of tarpaper to help keep out the drafts. We never used the front door as an entry, anyway, no matter the season, though we did open it on hot summer days to provide ventilation. The screen door in the kitchen was also covered with tarpaper to ward off the cold that seeped into the kitchen on the coldest days.

Pa checked the woodstoves in the pump house and in the potato cellar to make sure they were in working order. The former kept the pump from freezing and cutting off the water supply for the cattle, horses, and hogs—and for us, although we used very little water during the winter. The latter would not be lit until frost threatened our cash crop of potatoes, usually in mid-November.

Pa dug around in the machine shed and found the water tank heater, a wood-burning stove that kept our outdoor stock tank from freezing. About two-thirds of the stove would be immersed in the water tank; the remaining third, which consisted of a stovepipe and a little door for stuffing wood into the stove, would stick up above the tank’s surface. The stock tank received its water from the overflow of the milk-cooling tank in the pump house. In the cold months, when the cattle were housed in the barn twenty-four hours a day, we let them outside once or twice a day to drink from the water tank. The short trip to the water tank provided the cows some exercise, and briefly moving them out of their stanchions made it easier to carry in straw for their bedding.

While Pa was making these preparations, Ma continued to convert the house to winter mode. The double doors to the parlor and the back bedroom that led off of it were closed for the winter. Our family would essentially live in two rooms, the kitchen and the dining room, the only rooms that had wood-burning stoves. Ma and Pa’s bedroom, off the dining room, received some heat from the dining room’s heater, and my brothers and I made do with the little heat that seeped from the dining room heater’s stovepipe.

Now, after much toil, the house was buttoned up and ready for whatever winter would bring our way.