Bitter cold brings back a memory

Share

Unbelievable. It’s 15-below in my neighborhood this morning. I remember a time when I was a little kid. The temperature in Chicago that day was 16-below. We only had one car in the family and my dad took it to work, so we had to walk to school in all kinds of weather. But my mom was concerned about us little kids walking in the 16-below weather. So she made us wait until it was only 10-below.

The upshot, of course, was that I (a first grader) and my sister (then in third grade) arrived at school 90 minutes late. After I’d hung my coat up and taken my boots off, the nun who taught my grade stood me up in front of the class and loudly announced to the other students: “Look at the big baby. Everyone else got to school on time.” Ah, memories of my school career…

Anyway, we’re getting record lows all over the Midwest. Check it out: Imagine the heating bills. Two young single women I know had to move out of their apartment recently after only two months because for a small 2-bedroom, they were paying over $200 a month in heating bills–and that was before the mercury plunged into the minus-double-digit region.


You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or create a trackback from your own site.

There are no comments yet, be the first to say something


Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.