A Sword

Sometimes the cold is a knife, cutting through whatever you wear, and biting at your flesh, like a frenzied fox. 

Fingers freeze to the door handle if you are too dumb to wear gloves to walk the sausage dog.

(At least she makes a nice, warm muff, when she suddenly becomes too cold to walk back to the house and must be carried. If anyone had told me during the Border Collie years that I would have a dog that needed to be carried to the house I would have laughed at them.)

And then sometimes the cold is like a sword. You swear it will sweep your head right off as the wind howls down the valley and even the windows in the warmest rooms are  shrouded in frost.

I know this weather is nothing to you tough folks who scoff at twenty below, but ..........brrr......

I feel bad for the boss, who has to load out hay today for one of our better customers. The hay mow might be a sauna in the summer, but not so much this time of year.

At any rate, having looked at the forecast, which does not show any improvement for the next week or so, I am glad that my boy is bringing me home one of the things he is wearing in the photos. I told him not to do it....but he did anyhow....and I am looking forward to wearing the rechargeable, heated, hoodie that he bought me.

He wears one for work...all those hours outdoors..... and he is very thin and feels the cold, especially after he does a lot of physical stuff like wielding what he calls a "muck stick"....and then cooling off when he stops.

Funny thing about that....his middle name is after my beloved maternal grandfather, who was all legs and arms and gangly like a stork, but a truly wonderful man. We couldn't know that our red-headed, newborn baby boy would grow up to be all long and lean and sweet just like the man whose name he carries.

He will be home tonight I think.....and I'm glad because we all miss him when he's gone.