These were the formations of life long sinus infections....these young years practicing with cold - a constant companion and environmental benefactress. ...Waking up in the morning under light quilts made of thin cotton flour sacks all cut into patches and formed into strange patterns, sewn against a light muslin and something questionable and thin set between the two surfaces as a supposedly warming filler. It was winter, so there were thin lindsey-woolsey 'homespun' sheets under the useless quilt as well. They were mere prayers for warmth. Prayers indeed spun by grandparents long gone.
Pajamas weren't warm, back in these old days, the only thing we knew was cotton. Maybe thin cotton flannel, a slightly softer hairier kinder-feeling excuse as a covering for night times. Why I wasn't really aware of the temperature encasing my little body like a soft refrigerant was only due to the exhaustion from staying up so late waiting for Daddy to get home from the club.
He worked at the VFW down the street a few blocks, and I was "Daddy's Little Girl," something he sang to me often on these nights, as I - embarrassed - smiled and fell quickly to slumber. It was a long day for Dad, I took him lunch daily and still, he wasn't home 'till close to midnight.
Anyway, this was morning wake-up-call, through that single-pane rotted wood window, the cold winter frost on the glass sucking the heat away from my left side which was always close enough to the window to be a down-right danger. I knelt on the sagging mattress with the view of the old gray buildings right across the street. They seemed tall and narrow, built into the shale layered hillside of an old oil boom town. These were erected in quick fashion and it showed. Boxes, dark, tilty thrown right up against that crumbling hillside, mud sometimes seeping around their edges. (The necessity of providing for newcomers in the era pre Civil War and past it.)
There were railings still, old iron railings footed in cement all the way 'round the block, where once a horse could be tied up, and a drunk could convey himself from the bar over there to the tilty house over here. Every speck of serviceable space that could quickly be used without much excavating and the use of technical hard core equipment.....horse, buggy, oxen, wagon....this was what built this part of town.
When the sun rose, the glaze of ice on the window in front of me melted in light patches and ran with tiny crystal patterns all over the thing. I made pictures on the ice with my finger nails, murals of people, of family, of the folks in the other half of the house, of dogs which we would never have since Wolfie bit me right on the face.
The figures and the dogs and trees and cars would disappear during the day, falling in thin ice frostings like forgotten dreams. The ice tasted kind of like coal dust. Maybe before we got there...but not now. We only had the little gas stove in the living room. No heat up here, no heat under this attic space, no heat by this window with the view of old gray silent dwellings and a sun rising.
My first taste of winter's day was a bit of my ice sculpture, and the rest of the day could only be a reward. The space by the gas stove where I drew with crayons on the walls, warm.... All day I could draw and stay warm, and never consider what cotton tee shirts and long boy pants I wore against the chill of the floor. Crayons melted easily, my colors were a band of murals about three feet high as a diorama record of happiness as only the poor are aware.
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