We're heading for another cold night.  I don't really know how high the thermometer got today on the front side of the house - I have the window where the thermometer is covered with a window quilt because there seems to be a lot of cold air coming in on that particular window.  I checked the thermometer on the back of the house and the highest I saw was zero.  It's probably heading downward again by now.  We're cozy inside, but by mid afternoon I put up the window quilts on the big living room windows, too.  They are a huge expanse of glass to have to heat.  Love the view, hate the heat loss.

I had an interesting note from Helen Morrison today.  As some of you probably know, Helen taught science at Cabot School for many years.  Today she told me about one of the courses she taught that I had never known about.  I knew she took groups on field trips, once exploring and camping out on the route that Col. Jacob Bayley followed when he built the military road in 1776 over Cabot Plain, but that was quite different from the course she mentioned today.  Here's what she wrote: 

I've also been thinking about the very cold weather for a number of days now.  I personally like it and respect it.  It was very long ago that this was a typical occurrence...a week, sometimes longer, of -20 deg, even colder.  I remember when I first started teaching at Cabot in the early 80's, we would do a winter survival course with the kids.  We would prepare them all fall...how to make fires with no matches, how to stay warm, how to build a shelter of tree branches and snow, how to make a pack frame of sticks.  Then in Jan or Feb we would go up to Sterling College and go out for a 3-4 day winter campout.  The first time it was around -20 deg the whole time, day and night.  We kept our lunch warm in our armpits or it would freeze solid.  We'd hike all day, keeping relatively warm.   At night, we'd warm our fronts and then our backs, rotating, in front of the fire, while we also cooked over it.  We'd snuggle down in our snow/branch igloos for the night.  It was a challenge and we met it.  It felt good to do that.

The important thing about lengthy periods of very cold weather is that it kills off and prevents pests, diseases, etc. from making their way north.  With Climate Change and Global Warming, without that killing weather, we are looking at a serious change in what we have to deal with up here, including those pests and diseases.

 Like I told Helen - I bet those students think often about those trips and it must be a source of great pride and accomplishment for them, even now.  Even in warmer than below-zero weather, camping out in the winter is not something everyone would do, but how great that those youngsters did it and will always have those survival skills.

I really like the idea of killing off the bugs, too.  We've already seen some changes in patterns of animals and birds that are probably due to Global Warming/Climate Change - it helps to be able to think of this stretch of bitter cold doing something good for us, not just enlarging our heating bills.