Family

This week's cold snap brought the annual debate of when it was late enough — read: chilly enough — to turn on the heat. It's a decision that received more scrutiny in the last week of October 2008, which will probably one day be known as the week in which time stood still.

Our household discussion centered on just how cold we could go before it reached the point of "abuse and neglect" of the children. Each morning, the 6-year-old Miss Priss came down the hall, wrapped in fluffy pajamas, a Winnie the Pooh robe (complete with ears on the hood) and socks.

A small box heater cranked away under the kitchen table, but she still shook like a paint mixer while her body accustomed itself to life outside the cocoon of bed covers.

The 9-year-old was a little more cranky, having a hard time believing that warming the kitchen by cooking biscuits (and then leaving the oven door open after they finished) was sound thermal policy.

All this brings to mind one of those stories parents love to tell their children: How hard it was When I Was Your Age.

I grew up in a drafty old farmhouse that sat high on a hill in north-central Kentucky. Our heat came from a wood-burning stove in the kitchen. Bedrooms were upstairs, and it wouldn't be until high school science class that I actually believed this theory that heat rises, since it never felt as though any warmth crept up that staircase.

Sheets of ice crystals on the inside of your bedroom window are never a good sign.

While we this past week had the ritual of first one up, turn on the box heater, on the farm the tradition was last one to bed, stoke the stove full enough to burn through the night. The first one up was in charge of firing it up for the day.

This time of year was also when chunks of the weekend would be spent splitting firewood. On the way in from the barn each night, everyone would grab an armload or two or three of firewood and stack it in the kitchen.

When this is pointed out to the 9-year-old, who at this age does not have to get out of bed in sub-freezing weather to work outside for an hour or two before walking to the bus stop, he decides the box heater in the morning and a throw blanket on the couch at night aren't such bad deals.

I still love the smells and sounds of a fireplace — an ambiance that doesn't come with a functional wood- or coal-burning stove. Light the fireplace downstairs in our house, and the family gravitates toward it like swallows seeking the sunlight of San Juan Capistrano.

The nostalgia of hearth-warmed homes plays bigger in memory than it ever did in reality. It was hard work. It was dirty work. And, in a wet Midwestern winter, hauling cords of wood out of a gully was a miserable chore that no amount of time warming your feet by the fire would erase.

Maybe it's time to give the gas company some business after all.