This past week our area was plunged into an arctic cold that had me wishing I could wrap myself in a cacoon of blankets and only crawl out to use the potty and get snacks.

I spent much of the beginning of the week acting like anyone who stepped outside our door into the arctic cold would immediately turn into ice and shatter.

“Don’t go out there!” I’d cry. “It’s so cold and you could get hypothermia! Frost bite!”

“Mom,” The Boy would say. “I’m just going to get some wood from the woodpile. Chill.”

Our animals stared forlornly out the windows at the snow that fell right before the temps dropped into single digits. Sometimes the cats would stare sadly at the back door and I would let them out. Sometimes less than ten minutes later they were looking in the window in our kitchen from the outside, their little faces panicked, as if I didn’t just tell them it was deathly cold outside.

Our cats have been curling up in front of the woodstove on most days and nights. They are much more cuddly than in warmer weather, as I have mentioned before. The youngest, Scout has even started curling up with me in the mornings before I am out of bed and it is during one of these cuddle sessions this morning that I was reminded how evil cats are. I am convinced they are sorcerers or sorceresses.

What Scout does is climb on my chest already purring. Then she bumps her nose against my nose and licks my chin. Her eyelids are all heavy and she sniffs the pillow next to me, bumping her head against my cheeks and chin and then finally curling up against my arm, next to my neck and shoulder. She snuggles as close to my face as she cans and begins to purr more in earnest, all while watching me with half-open eyes, drawing me into  her spell.

Sometimes she stretches her legs and paws out across my chest and purrs more, urging me into a deep sleep after I have already said I need to get out of bed and get the fire started.

“No,” she seems to say. “You will lay here. You will fall into a deep, all-consuming slumber. You will be delayed in starting your day. Why? Because I, your cat overlord, demand it. You are losing willpower. You are growing warm, cozy, and, most importantly, sleep. There you go. That’s right. Don’t fight it. Ignore the dog. She can pee later. What you need is me, your warm cat overload, your warm blanket, and the dreams of walking in a peaceful forest that I am now planting in your head. That’s right…you’re getting sleepy….”

Sometimes I wake up and she’s snoozing next to me – like she got some of her magic sleep dust on herself. Other times I wake up and she’s gone, and I wonder if she cast her spell so she can get up to some mischief elsewhere in the house.

This morning I fought her hard and finally managed to crawl out of bed and find some sunlight coming into our living room, which is welcome, but misleading since it is still only 25F (-3C), which is much better than 8F (-13).

It was so cold last week that not even our furnace, woodstove, and electric heat upstairs could seem to drive the cold out of our rooms.

I spent most of the week locked inside, watching Edwardian Farm, All Creatures Great and Small, and old movies.

I also read quite a bit.

On Thursday I was finally able to break free (“ I want to break free…I want to break free….” Sorry. I always end up humming songs with lyrics that matched what I just said. I know. I’m weird.) and go visit my parents while The Husband stayed at home and suffered through the cold the kids had had earlier in the week. I hadn’t seen my Mom since January 8 and had only briefly seen my dad during that time. Either it was too cold or I had sick children and was worried I’d be next and pass whatever virus we had on to them.

Somehow, I either managed to avoid the illness or had such minor symptoms that it did not hit me as hard.

At my parents I looked through a bunch of old photo albums and found some interesting photographs. One of those photographs I will share in a future blog post to tie up my posts about letters written between my great-great grandfather and his brothers during the Civil War.

Other photographs are photos I have seen many times over the years. They are from a photo album that my grandmother said belonged to Ivy, her aunt. I don’t know if Ivy took all of the photographs, but Grandma said she believed that she took some and collected the others. There are photographs of her sisters and my grandmother and her sister when they were babies. My grandmother was born in 1909 and Ivy died in 1915 so Grandma didn’t really remember her, but she remembered stories about her. Ivy passed away at the age of 29 from a kidney condition.

Based on the photographs of her and others in the book, she seemed like a very adventurous and fun person.

My favorite photo of her is this one:

This is her and her sister Carmen.


Second is this one:

I also like this one and wonder what she’s doing in this photo.

And I love this posed shot with these four women, though there was nothing written in the album to tell me who they are. I think one is Ivy and maybe Carmen again.

I just love their poses and the artistic elements of this shot.

The album, by the way, is made with photographs glued to black pages with no plastic to protect them.

I used to sit in the floor of my grandma’s living room, haul that album and other old loose photos out of a box and just pour over them. They fascinated me — the outfits, expressions, locations I could recognize from the tiny village I grew up in – a portal to life long ago.

There used to be a train station in the little village  (which is only a few houses and an old church and cemetery) I grew up in. There is a path by the creek that is overgrown but yet still features a cleared path where the train tracks used to be and that never seems to grow over no matter how many years have passed.  Parts of the stone used to build the railroad bridge is still located there, but most of the railroad tracks themselves are gone.

There is one photo in this book of a group of women and a few men sitting along the tracks and the platform. As I was preparing this post I noticed I had not taken a photo of that photo so I can’t share it here. That’s probably because it was a pretty dark photo – so dark I could barely make out the three men sitting behind the women in all white.

In the photo, though, I can recognize the exact spot it was taken even though it was 116 years ago. Behind the group, to the left would be the field where cows now roam and beyond that field is the house that I grew up in — a house built maybe 150 years ago.

The house is still standing but in not great shape and no longer owned by us.

The photographs that really interest me in this book are the  unique ones. The ones where no one is looking at the camera or if they are they are doing so it is in a playful way.

There is one photo where we can see a man through the bushes and I imagine he is on his way to the shore of the pond that used to be there behind the cemetery.

I have created this story in my mind that Ivy took that photograph of him secretly because she had a crush on him, or maybe they were an item. Further on in the book there is a photo of her with this same man. They are sitting in the buggy of a horse and carriage.

Maybe they weren’t “an item.” Maybe they are related somehow, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the name in the genealogy.  

It’s always made me wonder if they ever had a relationship, but it ended because of her health issues. She never married before she passed away.

I’d better stop rambling about family history or this blog post could go on for a long time.

This is a subject I find myself blathering about to people who probably consider faking a heart attack just to get away from me.

We are expecting cold weather again this upcoming week but we have nowhere to go, other than maybe visiting my parents once or twice.

What have all of you been doing? How is the weather where you are? Do you have anything exciting going on during the upcoming week?