I guess if you've
lived long enough to learn to read, then you already know that it would
only be natural that that winter be the coldest one that this country has
seen before or since. It dropped down to 24 below one God-forsaken night
and we had a foot of snow cover for two months.
Staying warm though,
wasn't really one of our problems. We had one wood-fired stove on the
extreme end of the building (because that's where the only flue was). In
order to keep the plumbing, in the middle of the house, from freezing,
which it did anyway, we usually had to keep things so hot in the west end,
that nobody seemed to mind that the whole east section, where we slept,
wasn't heated at all.
About that time,
inflation was going crazy and everybody wanted to buy real estate, so I
was very, very busy. So busy in fact, that while we'd planned to start
building what was coming to be called "the real house" the first spring we
were there, that got put off as I needed to devote more time to business.
Consequently, all the
stuff piled up against the walls began to show all the dust that fell over
those months of living with a leaky wood-burning stove, to say nothing of
all those built-up years of chicken-dust. Things got filthy, and it became
harder and harder to stay clean ourselves.
In the middle of all
this squalor, Jessica decided to be born, and being dedicated
back-to-the-land types (or something) my wife and I decided to have the
birth there in our chicken-house.
When we headed into
the second winter in the chicken-house, I'm sure my wife was beginning to
wonder if "the real house" weren't just another of my numerous flights of
fancy.
I guess about now
you're thinking that I'm going to grace the whole experience with some
heartwarming anecdote about Christmas in the Chicken-house, or how being
stuffed into a really tiny space until our eyes bugged out made us a
closer and happier family.
It didn't. It made us all
appreciate how cool it would be to have a room with a door and a lock on
it again. The truth is, it was pretty grim, and probably the worst part
of it, for me at least, was that I started to think of myself as someone
who lived in an old chicken house, and that wasn't okay with me.
If I had it to do
over again, I'd do something else.
The best memory I have about the
whole episode is that of waking up in the new house. Everything seemed so
bright and clean. I remember the smug feeling I had lying on my back and
gazing up at the new ceiling, so clean, so white and SO far away.
A few years ago, we
burned down the chicken-house. Jessica invited all her friends and family
to watch her birthplace go up in flames. No tears were shed. It made a
nice party, and I finally got even with that rafter.
