Aye, it's a cold moment today matey!

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Isaac Newton

I remember back to the '70s when we first moved here to my father's birth town. We grew most of our own food. The whole yard, almost, was vegetable garden, D. made all our daily bread; it was hard to find whole wheat flour in those days. We made yogurt and peanut butter. In the unheated garage I raised chickens, rabbits and, one year, turkeys.

Every January you could count on two weeks where the temperature never rose above zero for any part of the day or night. Night temps routinely hovered in the minus 20s. I had to trudge to the animal's keep 3 or more times a day to provide them with unfrozen water.

The water lines in the village were subject to freezing in those days too.

Also I recall walking to school in the early sixties; one morning in particular, the temp was -30 degrees F.. I wore ear muffs that day.

It seems to me that winters here, over-all, have been much milder in the past twenty years.