Memories of Cold Winters

A recent snow overwhelmed a village.
Photo: Bing

It is bitter cold outside, it feels like 11 degrees Fahrenheit. The relentless Hawk is blowing arctic air, exacerbating the wind tunnel effect surrounding our house. Luckily, we are warm and cozy inside, thanks to capitalism.

When I was a kid growing up with my maternal grandparents, their tiny adobe style mud-brick winter house had two rooms, a barn for the animals, a tiny kitchen, and the hay loft for cats and mice. They never heated the big brick house because it required too much wood which they did not have. The communist farms had already deforested anything that could be cut down and used for wood.

The winters were bitter cold, and we stayed inside to stay warm. It was not unusual to have 5 feet of snow the entire winter. The whole country was situated above the 45 parallel north and all winters were extremely cold, with fast freezing temperatures and mountains of snow for months on end.

We had a whole mountain of salt at Slanic, that is something the Communist Party could not screw up in mining and delivering where it was needed. When the fresh snow melted in the city after generous treatment of roads with salt, because the sewers could not manage so much ice melt all the time, the streets turned into veritable ankle-deep rivers, with buses spraying the pedestrians with muddy grey slush and water. In many spots, the mountains of snow plowed off the streets protected the pedestrians from being soaked by passing cars and buses, but on larger streets, with pedestrian crosswalks, if you did not have tall rubber boots to handle the shallow river, or you were unlucky to cross when a vehicle drove by, you could count on taking a shower of dirty icy water.

Snow stayed more pristine in the country, 9 km (5.6 miles) away from the city only because the bus only ran twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, providing that it did not break down along the way.

Somebody had to go out and feed the animals and that somebody was usually grandma. Grandpa was busy fixing someone’s bike so they could ride to work or to see their relatives at the far end of the village.

My aunts Nuta and Nicuta lived at the end of the village, and I rode a bike many times to see them in summertime, never in winter. We walked from there to the crystal-clear river about one km away, with large fish swimming about. We were not afraid even though none of us could swim – the fearless ignorance of youth.

Grandpa rode his bike to work in bitter cold in winter. The round trip was 18 km (11.2 miles). If it sounds like a short distance, it was, but try doing that in subzero temperatures, surrounded by nothing but flat prairies, with no trees in sight to block the wind and gales of icy snow cutting your face like tiny daggers. It might as well have been to the moon and back to me.

All those cats living in the hayloft brought about fleas and did not make much dent in the rodent population living in the walls because I could hear them playing catch at night. Grandpa dusted the cats periodically with DDT but the fleas hitched rides and returned with a vengeance. We were covered in flea bites but warm from the wood stove. Good thing nobody developed allergies or terrible itching reactions and rashes from so many bites as there were no meds to be found in the socialist paradise we lived under.

I was so relieved when I was old enough to go to first grade and move in with my parents in the city into a much larger space of about 450 square feet. It felt like a cold palace in wintertime but no flea bites. And I had way more kids living in the same apartment complex to play with.