May 5
It’s god-awful cold here! The temperature hit -28 this morning. I lit a fire in the stove in the barn last night and packed it with coal to keep it going for the night. I used to burn just wood, but the fire wouldn't last the night. In the morning, the thermometer inside the barn would go as low as twnety degrees—far too cold for laying hens. We keep heat lamps going all winter, attached to thermostats that turn them on when the temp drops below fifty. But in this weather, even the heat lamps don’t offer enough warmth. This winter, I picked up a few hundred pounds of coal in burlap bags. It burns all night and keeps the barn above freezing. We can’t burn it in the house, though. The guy who sold it to me warned that it burns too hot, and would blow out the glass in the door of the stove in our living room.
The price of coal surprised me: about six bucks per hundred pounds. No wonder they ship it all over the country by the railcar.
The water pipes in the back bathroom froze last night, too. I left the faucets on in case they thaw. We should have left them on slightly all night. A small stream of water is enough to keep them from freezing. I hate doing it: wasting all those gallons of water offends my conservative sensibilities. But frozen pipes are worse. If they burst, it’ll cost far more than a few dozen gallons of water.
If they don’t thaw, I’ll crawl under the house with a blow drier and warm the pipes. I’m not looking forward to that. So far, it’s still below zero outside, and I doubt the crawl space under the house is much warmer.
Fortunately, we learned our lesson shortly after moving out here: we keep an electric heater going in the pump house to keep the well from freezing. These are things we never had to worry about in Los Angeles, where it never freezes and the city brings our water in from hundreds of miles away. It’s both strange and exhilarating to be responsible for our own water. Life here is, in many ways, an adventure.
In this weather, I have no urge to go outside. The wind blows down the valley out of the north, the wind chill making it feel even colder than the thermometer suggests. But I stand at the window and watch the landscape. Snow glistens in the bright sun. Jackrabbits graze on sagebrush and greasewood and whatever else they can find. A bald eagle swoops low, looking for food, and the rabbits scatter.
Inside, with the wood stove fired up, it’s easy to forget that this activity takes place in uncomfortably cold temperatures. Regardless of the weather, all God’s creatures need to eat—and it’s only we few lucky ones that stock up with canned goods.
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