POLICY
Big Chills and Strong Wills By: Kelly Warren Moore
I
was born in the Midwest, and most of my extended family still lives there, so I am not unaccustomed to the hazards of winter weather. When we were kids, visiting my grandparents on the Nebraska plains was an adventure. We would almost always encounter icy roads and treacherous driving conditions on the way there from our home in Corpus Christi. Mom and Dad were prepared with blankets in the car and plenty of water and food for the drive, “just in case.” Once we got to my grandparents’ old farmhouse, there was indoor plumbing, but still a working outhouse. My grandmother’s gas range was almost always on from dawn until after supper, so the kitchen was warm no matter how frigid it was outside. There was a gas heater in the central room of the house downstairs, which kept things warm enough, but we still wore heavy socks and sweaters all during the day. At night, we’d go upstairs to the bedrooms. The door to upstairs was kept closed during the day to conserve the heat downstairs but open at night so that some heat would make its way to those bedrooms, and there were piles of grandma’s homemade quilts and heavy woolen blankets on all of the beds. My sister and I shared a bedroom, and we’d race into our pajamas and under those covers as fast as we could to preserve body heat. I can remember struggling to pull the heavy bed covers up far enough to jump in, and for the first few minutes, it would feel like their weight might crush me once I was under them.
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SHALE MAGAZINE MAY/JUNE 2021
But once I fell asleep, they kept me warm and feeling secure all night. (I haven’t yet succumbed to the siren calls of the advertisements for “weighted blankets’’ that seem to be everywhere these days, but I certainly do understand their appeal, I learned about that firsthand!) Those experiences, along with 15 or so years as a grown woman living in the Northeastern United States, have taught me how to get along, survive, and even thrive in cold weather. I get excited when there’s the annual once or twice a year “severe winter weather” alert, planning what long and labor-intensive, delicious comfort food I’m going to make, what books I want to read and movies I want to watch should we get the rare South Texas “snow day.” So, once we started hearing about this potential cold-weather blast just after Valentine’s Day, we took it all in stride. We had just brought two Labrador pups home with us a few weeks before, and both my husband and I have been working from home, so there wasn’t going to be any worry about how our work travel might be impacted or what meetings would be canceled. There was plenty of food in the refrigerator and freezer, and the new puppies’ first experience with cold weather was going to be fun. Little did we know, this was not going to be just any ordinary winter-weather experience. We saw the horrendous footage of massive car pile-ups in the DFW metroplex, and then as the cold moved further south, we heard about snow and ice from our for-
