A bitterly cold winter makes for a hard life in the countryside, but community prevails
Illustration: Lynn Hatzius
OPINION
While our winters have become milder and less predictable, a freezing spell can make life harder in rural places, throwing the focus back upon the importance of community cohesion and neighbourly interaction.
Though it is enlivening and exhilarating, working outdoors in the sort of ‘proper winter’ many of us love, is hard. For me, it’s the stubbornly frozen gate padlocks or barn-door bolts, far from a source of hot water, that can bring me close to tears.
It can be so cold it hurts. You can work up a sweat, pulling layers off and putting them back on, then shivering uncontrollably when the moisture cools on your body and the sun dips away. And there are any number of jobs that can’t be done with gloves on: using a spanner to tighten a bolt, doing up buckles on a bridle or saddle – and twice a day, if there are animals, you’re going to have to get your hands in the trough to lift out panes of ice, as whole as you possibly can. It is key, then, to remember not to put your wet hands on the metal gate, for fear of them sticking.
It’s vital to have good relations with your neighbours (as well as good for the soul), to be able to knock and ask for a flask or pan of warm water to tip over frozen metal or, when the outside taps freeze (despite being thatched in straw and baler-twined with an old feed sack), buckets-full from the kitchen tap.
Last winter, our small wood axe was employed to chip at the thickening ice in the field buckets over days, creating a succession of cold, fallen moons laid out beside them in sequence: quarter moon, half moon, full, and waning; each having captured air bubbles like clouds across their surface.
Bucketing water down to the horses is treacherous on the icy lanes, and a slip and spillage can result in water sloshed down the inside of your wellies and a patch of new black ice on the road. It is warmth personified when the shepherd you wave to in the pick-up every day returns your daily cheerfulness, driving your buckets down to the field gate.
FROZEN STILL
Getting out can be a problem, too. Never mind snow – neighbours or roads can become iced-in. The WhatsApp groups that have remained since Covid lockdowns kick in again, to help those who daren’t risk a slip; shopping lists, pr
