Whoever described Mother Nature as a sweet dancing lady in the forest with flowers in her hair was a fool. I am here to tell you she has a cold temper and an icy heart. It is my firm belief she has decided to lock me in my house with my children and a shortage of propane just to make me crazy enough to clean my closets! Yes I know it’s hard to believe that she would stoop to punishing the rest of you for my lack of organization skills but there you have it.
Several school closings and a month of below freezing weather is all the proof I need. She wants me to be bored and insane so I start tossing unneeded clothes and paper scraps that I found so important at one time that I jammed them in a closet for safe keeping… out of sight, out of mind and safely stored until the frosty winter of 2014.
I grew up in a house that was either really cold, where my brother and I stood by an open oven door to dress for school in the morning or very hot as the wood stove blazed through the dried maple wood. It was a house of extreme temperatures and during the long winter months extreme boredom.
I honestly don’t think of boredom as a bad thing for children and clearly Mother Nature doesn’t either. In my mind it leads to creativity and activity. When I was bored growing up it led to lots of baking and hours of reading—still two of my favorite things to do with my time. Mother Nature might have been nasty back then too but she obviously liked the smell of warm banana bread and was a fan of the Boxcar Children.
I believe this is also a Mother Nature conspiracy to get me to start drinking coffee again…. tea is not cutting the cold in my feet. Hot coffee and lots of it feels good when I wake up to a house with an external temperature of 17 below and an internal temperature of 57 degrees.
“What!” I hear you say… but yes, we turned our thermostat down to 55 to try and eke by the rest of the winter on the amount of propane we pre-bought this season. Okay, that plan only lasted about a week and I gave in to set it to 62. It’s impossible to clean anything from under a pile of blankets! Mother Nature might be blowing a cold and nasty winter our way but it appears she’s a mom with a plan.
Peace and warm thoughts to you!
Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.
Edith Sitwell
Taste of Home columnist Sandy (Anderson) Holthaus lives on a farm in South Haven, MN with her husband, Michael, and their children Zoe, Jack and Ben. Her heart remains on the North Shore where she grew up with her parents, Art and LaVonne Anderson of Schroeder. She enjoys writing about her childhood and mixes memories with delicious helpings of home-style recipes.
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