Oh, the weather outside is frightful...

I am not complaining but it HAS been a severe winter for North Georgia and it's only January!
I always have my eyes on the Northeast as I have so many ties to that area...I am sure a real Mainer
would laugh hearing me say it has been a rough winter...but in New England there is a whole different standard.

On Christmas we got 6inches and this past week Georgia got slammed with another storm and this time there was ice with  it. We got 8-10inches and that is a big deal !!!

Several years ago I took an Amtrack train from Chicago to the west coast. I remember looking out the window across the vast plains and thinking "what do these people do in the winter" you might not see your closest neighbor for months!! I tried to imagine what that would be like and how I might adapt to living in such an isolated
enviroment. I live in city limits where everything I need is a stones throw away....how must people in the plain states prepare for a winter that is severe?

Then my mind drifted back to my many Yankee ancestors ...ancestors that I never knew but are so familiar to me
since I have been doing genealogy. How did they with even less resources than the homes I saw on the Amtrack train ( no refrigeration, no big farm plow, no computer, no telephone, and even the clothing was not on a par with the warm clothes we have today....how did they fare?

Now, I have not always lived within a stone's throw of a grocery store. When my children were young we
bought a home over 100yrs old. It had three rooms 17x17 and they had fireplaces plus a loft room and was most likely the parents room up the narrow stairs and two very small bathrooms that were added in later years.
We were young and this old home was a romantic idea ( you know baking my own bread, having some chickens
and goats and an old barn and some gorgeous old pecan and a ceder tree to enjoy)...LOL..I shudder thinking of it now. The first winter I wore my coat inside the house. Water would freeze INSIDE the house.The romance was short lived,  as we tried to figure out how to keep warm. Some wood burning stoves definitely helped the situation but I can still hear my daughter saying "why can't we live like normal people?"
Remember those TV shows that had a family live like they colonials did? Eat the same food and wear the same clothes? Well, my 100+yr old farm house was fairly close to that experience.
NO, you won't hear me complain...I have a nice gas fireplace and other house heat. I appreciate living in a city where they plow the streets and sand them when a storm arrives and I store enough food so we can be very comfortable in a January cold week. I am older and wiser now....but glad I had the experience years ago.
No you will NOT hear me complain!!!