Winter, here and there

I am reading Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. I am only a few pages into this book and can't put it down. Don't you just love when that happens?
I enjoy snuggling up and reading a book. I despise winter and wonder how I survived winter in Alaska forty years ago. When the temperature was forty below zero, I huddled under a woolen, olive drab army blanket. Television reception in our little town at the end of the Alaska Highway consisted of three shows: the evening news from Fairbanks one hundred miles away, Sesame Street or the Army channel during the day. The newscast was live and often the camera would pan the male anchors as they licked their palms and smoothed their hair before they went on air. The World News reels were flown in from Seattle a day after they aired in the lower 48, so Walter Cronkite's news was always a day old.

The cold wind always whispered under our door cracks during all four seasons, and when it whipped at gale force in winter, it ripped off the crank-style kitchen windows and shook the city-bus-sized trailer and wannigan (a wooden addition, the length of the trailer). The dark enveloped us eighteen hours a day; quickening hadn't occured yet, as I was in my first trimester of my first pregnancy. I slept through most of the next three months. Tonight feels like one of those biting cold evenings so long ago in Delta Junction, Alaska.