"This house doesn't have a lick of insulation," Brian told Mom when we
got back inside. "All the heat's going right through the roof."
"We may not have insulation," Mom said as we all gathered around the
stove. "but we have each other."
It got so cold in the house that icicles hung from the kitchen ceiling, the
water in the sink turned into a solid block of ice, and the dirty dishes
were stuck there as if they'd been cemented in place. Even the pan of
water that we kept in the living room to wash up in usually had a layer of
ice on it. We walked around the house wearing our coats and wrapped in
blankets. We wore our coats to bed, too. There was no stove in the
bedroom, and no matter how many blankets I piled on top of myself, I
still felt cold. I lay awake at night, rubbing my feet with my hands,
trying to warm them.
We fought over who got to sleep with the dogs—Tinkle, the Jack Russell
terrier, and Pippin, a curly-haired mutt who had wandered down through
the woods one day—because they kept us warm. They usually ended up
in a heap with Mom, because she had the bigger body, and they were
cold, too. Brian had bought an iguana at G. C. Murphy, the five-and-
dime on McDowell Street, because it reminded him of the desert. He
named the lizard Iggy and slept with it against his chest to keep it warm,
but it froze to death one night.
We had to leave the faucet under the house dripping or the water froze in
the pipe. When it got really cold, the water froze anyway, and we'd wake
up to find a big icicle hanging from the faucet. We tried to thaw the pipe
by running a burning piece of wood along it, but it would be frozen so
solid there was nothing to do but wait for the next warm spell. When the
pipe froze like that, we got our water by melting snow or icicles in the
tin pan on the potbellied stove.
A couple of times when there wasn't enough snow on the ground, Mom