Ice On The Windows

Sitting in front of a warm fireplace on a cold winter night, my mind begins to wander to other similarly cold winters in my childhood. A time and place where double pane windows and well-insulated houses were not as common as they are today, and where keeping warm took a little more effort than just turning up the thermostat.

Looking back it seemed as if winter preparations started about the same time as school started back up in the fall. Many Saturdays were spent cutting firewood with my dad to use in the old wood stove. At times I thought we were cutting enough to last a lifetime only to find that by winter’s end we had pretty much exhausted what we had cut. During a few long winters, we would have to cut more just to get through. Even today, I remember wishing we had cut a little more in the fall, because those woods could be so cold in the winter.

As winter would start to settle in and all of the wood was finally covered and dry, we would build a fire in the stove. Trust me when you come into the house on a cold winter day, or even the first thing in the morning when the floors were like ice, there was no better place to stand, than in front of that old wood stove. Even with a fire in the stove, old houses were still cold, and as the winds began to blow, many parts of those old houses were still cold.

Throughout my childhood, the houses we lived in all had windows that would let those cold northern winds come in around the edges of those old wooden or aluminum frames. One of the ways my father would stop the cold air from entering the house was to cover each window with plastic. While this was never very eye-catching, it did accomplish its goal and that was to keep out the cold.

However, even with the protection from the wind, if you have ever lived in a house like this, you know the windows still get very cold, even on the inside. Combine this with the heat inside the house and you have a perfect combination. The colder it would get outside, combined with the heat inside would make the windows sweat. As the water would start running down the inside of the windows, it would start accumulating and freezing at the bottom of the window. Many cold winter mornings I have seen more ice on the inside than on the outside of those old windows.

As the sun would shine through the plastic and fill the room, the ice on the windows would appear as prisms glistening with light coming through them. Still, I remember sitting and watching, the ice melt, and how each drop of water would look like a crystal sliding down the window and onto the ledge. As I close my eyes now each drop of water reminds me of what it was like to be a child, and how even the bitter cold of winter never seemed to be an interruption.

Our experiences, especially as children shape our view of the world. Mine were of a loving family, where we worked together to make the best of every situation. No matter what was going on there was never a fear of getting too cold, because we knew it was always warm inside. My mom and dad taught us early to be prepared before the storm, whether literally or figuratively, we knew just what to do.

No matter how prepared we seem to be as children, for some reasons as we enter into our teens and twenties, many of us forget those lessons from our youth. We start flying by the seat of our pants and fail to recall just what it meant to prepare before the storm. Then as life’s storms and bitter winds start blowing through our lives we find ourselves out in the cold and many times feel as if we’ll never find our way back.

Even now, we would all do ourselves well to remember that if we prepare for our storms before they come, and they will come, we would learn that there is peace and rest inside where it is warm. Perhaps then, we can watch our problems roll away just as crystal drops of water, dripping from ice on the windows.