Since about New Year’s, I’ve been looking out the window, wishing the greenhouse effect were a little more ... effective. Because right now, mine is a cold cold world, where even the ice would like to be asked in for a cup of hot cocoa.

Alright, it has warmed up a bit, and it’s possible I’m being a baby. For example, not everything is covered in thick white snow anymore. Patches have melted away, revealing black mud and suggesting that somewhere in the world, humankind has thought to combine Oreo cookie crumbles with vanilla ice cream.

Those people were geniuses.

People round these parts were saying in January that this was the coldest it’s been in the region in 100 years. I’m not going to doubt the veracity of these claims, because imagining something colder makes my hair hurt.

Just how cold was it? So cold that when water finally - and unexpectedly - made it through the pipes and into the house, our kitchen flooded because the pipes out of the house were frozen. So cold that our toilet froze and someone in our house who wasn’t me had to poop in a bucket. So cold that I collected some twigs and dried berries, stashed them under the covers, crawled into bed, and didn’t come out for a month.

I’m including some photo evidence of the cold. In the first photo, you’ll see the crispy freezey view from our living room. In the second, you’ll see that our water storage turned into ice storage. You can’t quite see it, but a piece of steel wool fell into the bucket, froze, and couldn’t be recovered until this month.

-m