sent me next door to borrow a pail of water from Mr. Freeman, a retired
miner, who lived in the house with his grown son and daughter, Peanut
and Prissy. He never turned me down outright, but he would look at me
for a minute in silence, then shake his head and disappear into the house.
When he passed out the bucket, he would give me another disgusted
head-shake, even after I assured him that he could have as much water
from us as he wanted come spring.
"I hate winter," I told Mom.
"All seasons have something to offer," she said. "Cold weather is good
for you. It kills the germs."
That seemed to be true, because none of us kids ever got sick. But even if
I'd woken up one morning with a raging fever, I never would have
admitted it to Mom. Being sick might have meant staying home in our
freezing house instead of spending the day in a toasty classroom.
Another good thing about the cold weather was that it kept odors to a
minimum. By New Year's we had washed our clothes only once since
that first November snowfall. In the summer, Mom had bought a wringer
washing machine like the one we'd had in Phoenix, and we kept it in the
kitchen. When we had electricity, we washed the clothes and hung them
on the front porch to dry. Even when the weather was warm, they'd have
to stay out there for days, because it was always so damp in that hollow
on the north side of the mountain. But then it got cold, and the one time
we did our laundry, it froze on the porch. We brought the clothes inside
—the socks had hardened into the shape of question marks, and the pants
were so stiff you could lean them against the wall—and we banged them
against the stove, trying to soften them up. "At least we don't need to buy
starch," Lori said.
Even with the cold, by January we were all so rank that Mom decided it
was time to splurge: We would go to the Laundromat. We loaded our
dirty clothes into pillowcases and lugged them down the hill and up