![\"Morris](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/madisoncountycourier.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/Morris-head-new.jpg\")
<\/a>By\u00a0Hobie Morris<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n(Brookfield, NY – March 2015) An old Brookfield farmer once shared with us a winter weather maxim that has been especially true this year:\u00a0 \u201cwhen the days lengthen, the cold strengthens.\u201d<\/p>\n
You know it\u2019s been very cold when the knots in old hemlock boards begin popping like champagne bottle corks on New Year\u2019s Eve.\u00a0 Forest trees around our secluded home have been creaking, cracking and groaning in the cold, like a severely arthritic person trying to rise from a chair.<\/p>\n
Record breaking cold has temporarily put Central New Yorkers in a deep body and mental freeze as we hunker down like a hibernating black bear to patiently await the inevitable warming reprieve.<\/p>\n
For this simple country man and his beautiful, indomitable and extremely hardy Lois the last several months have been, in many ways, the ruggedest and coldest in our 35 years of living off the grid.<\/p>\n
The well known Brookfield winters are always challenging and endless.\u00a0 Its hills and highland valleys have earned a well deserved reputation for being semi-Arctic for both cold and snow severity, but this climate has produced very rugged\u00a0 and determined people who have a survivor\u2019s mentality no matter what curve balls life throws at them.<\/p>\n
A Jewish proverb states that two things are needed in winter\u2014fire and stories.\u00a0 Fire, of course, to warm the body and stories to warm the heart.\u00a0 Our off the grid living for 35 years contains a book full of yearly challenges, including in the winter mountains of snow, incessant hand shoveling, ushering in firewood from numerous piles to well used wood stoves.\u00a0\u00a0 We have no bulbs, lights, wires, thermostats, running water or plumbing of any kind.\u00a0 All these things have to be provided by other means, including dipping water from a shallow spring that bubbles up from Mother Earth.\u00a0 On extremely cold days the water is far warmer than the air above it.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s not a life style embraced by many.<\/p>\n
While it is often a solitary life, it is also a quiet and peaceful one, especially in the winter.\u00a0 While we work hard, we enjoy Mother Nature hard, too.<\/p>\n
This simple country man and his amazing wife Lois enjoy telling people that on cold mornings we put food on our pantry floor into our small propane refrigerator to keep items from freezing.\u00a0 With tongue in cheek I\u2019ll tell about Lois\u2019 voice coming to me as I worked in the woods in June.\u00a0 She called me to lunch in February and her call didn\u2019t thaw even though it was still in the air until the first warm day in June. Another time, when we drove into Brookfield, we saw the wood fire smoke like a white pencil in the air.\u00a0\u00a0 A man had put up a long ladder against it because it was frozen and he was chopping it down so additional smoke could come out into the Arctic air.\u00a0 An old-timer said one especially cold year candle flames froze and were broken off,stored\u00a0 and used to light fires later on.<\/p>\n
While I can\u2019t verify its accuracy, I\u2019ve heard tell that a blind horse once froze to death here in Brookfield in late July.\u00a0 It was so hot that a barn full of corn began popping.\u00a0 The horse near the barn felt the popcorn fall all around him and thought it was a snow storm.\u00a0 He started shivering, lay down in what he thought was snow, and the poor horse passed away.<\/p>\n
Come July, there will be a lot of old hemlock boards around Brookfield without knots.\u00a0 It\u2019s been that kind of a winter.<\/p>\n
Hobie Morris is a Brookfield resident and simple country man.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Musings of a Simple Country Man By\u00a0Hobie Morris (Brookfield, NY – March 2015) An old Brookfield farmer once shared with us a winter weather maxim that has been especially true this year:\u00a0 \u201cwhen the days lengthen, the cold strengthens.\u201d You know it\u2019s been very cold when the knots in old hemlock boards begin popping like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42368,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/madisoncountycourier.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/Morris-head-new.jpg?fit=226%2C287&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p43meu-fNw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60730\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}