About a winter long ago

Hi everyone,

Eighty years ago our family moved back to Springfield from Ajo, Arizona, where we had lived for the previous four years. War War II had just ended and veterans were coming home. Housing was hard to come by. All Dad could find, in our price range anyway, was a little place on a farm where the owner raised show horses. There was a small living room section that held our radio and some chairs, and a kitchen with an ice chest and a sink with a pump that brought in water for cooking and for filling the large tub we placed on the floor for bathing. Across the front was a porch that had been closed in to make a bedroom. Mom and Dad’s bed was tucked against one wall, mine against the opposite wall, and a pot-belly coal stove stood between us. There was no electricity. The privy was out back. The 1945 winter was cold and our little place was drafty. Several nights that month the low temperatures ranged from 10 to -5 degrees. On frigid nights after the fire in the stove went out, water in a glass beside my bed would freeze to ice. We slept in our clothes with all the extra bedding we owned on top of our blankets. I went to bed each night with a hot-water bottle tucked between my legs. That helped until the water cooled. Then it became a clammy, rubbery nuisance when I wanted to turn over. Years later I wrote of the experience in my book, Connecting Dots.

Welcome to Missouri

Cold surrounds my warm spot.
Rolling over
is like touching snow.
I think of snow angels.

With extra clothes
piled on the bed,
I think of chalk outlines. 
“This is where we found
the frozen body.”	

I miss my friends.
I hate this house,
the coal stove 
with its belly full
of cold ashes.

Dad says soon
we’ll find something better.

A prisoner inside
my own outline,
I wait for morning.

(c) 2007 David L. Harrison, all rights reserved