It was so cold on winter nights when neither Joel nor Kevin were living with us. They knew how to stoke a stove. I would stack as many as six blankets on top of myself, only to find I had kicked them in different directions by the middle of the night and I was shivering. I dreaded showering. I would swing my hair against the side of the woodstove to try to dry it faster. Didn't seem to make a difference. It was a dreary existence with no warm escape, no sympathy. My brother was mean, my mother was in pain, my dad was at work. The wood was always slightly damp.
There was one winter when the windows started freezing on the inside. Beautiful patterns of thick frost covering the kitchen windows, parts of my bedroom windows and some of the other windows around the house. Our house was built in the fifties. Some of the window frames were wood, some aluminum, none were well insulated. The frosted windows happened several times that winter; it was unusually cold. After that it only happened a couple times in subsequent winters. I think my blankets were frozen to the window one of those mornings. I know that happened to someone else at school.
