29 Below

Cold.  29 below.  Windchills make it feel nearly 50 below.  This kind of weather tests the outer limits of nearly anything subject to it's brutality.  Trucks groan to life and drive like a shopping cart with stuck wells.  Driving down the road one has to crank the heat on high or the enhanced windchill will frost over every window within moments of breaking 30 mph.  Every miniscule crack along a window or under the door frosts up.   Exposed skin-and uninsulated pipes- freezes in minutes.  Wood smoke creaps through the dense cold air like a stagnant blob of goo.  There's little room for error in this kind of weather.  Situations that normally would carry nominal consequences take on a different tone.

Once again, the woods are silent in the waxing moonlight.  Inside the wood stove churns.  We are snug and in deep sleep.  Then suddenly, in the early morning hours, the power goes out!  No longer do we have our electric baseboard heat to supplement the woodstove.  It's over 60 degrees below freezing outside.  Inside the stove and baseboards struggle to keep the cabin 40 degrees above freezing.  Without backup the stove quickly looses ground.  The distal corners away from the stove begin to cool.  I immediately stoke the stove, gather the baby, and set up the couch directly in front of the stove.    We cozy into the couch (dog and all), pile on our warmest layers of down and wool, and hope that embers hold and power is restored soon.

I nervously doze away the rest of the night-periodically stoking the birch inferno. Thankfully the cabin holds it's heat and within a couple of hours the power zaps back to life!  We fared well considering the deadly cold outside.  In the morning light the coals burned on, water flowed out of the pipes, the vehicles hesitantly started, and the lights illuminated brightly...