Drawing on a winter memory, and drawing for a free book

The wind whipped icy fingers up my coat sleeve today, tapped me on my shoulder, and reminded me that this cold snap does not even compare to the frigid arctic air (minus fifty degrees) that snatched my breath, cloistered my words in exhaled clouds that crashed to the ground, and numbed my toes until they burned... when I called Alaska home.  

Winter of 1969, belly ripe with first baby, stars so close in an ebony canopy that I could almost reach on tiptoe and pluck a sky diamond.

At midnight, the ancient fire truck wailed to a stop at the top of the snow-covered, gravel road in front of the white frame house. It was the only house on School Road amongst a string of crayon-colored dilapidated trailers with attached wannigans: room additions the length of the trailers, which created extended living space and the need for more diesel heating fuel, a commodity on soldier's pay.

Smoke billowed skyward from the Hinesly's home. Neighbors nosed outside in night clothes. Word travelled fast. "Only condensation in the attic. Not a fire."

But look up! We pulled our wraps tight and pointed bare fingers at the celestial smear of jeweled colors amongst the diamonds in the sky. My first glimpse of the Aurora Borealis. Northern Lights, what a sight!

How cold is it where you are? Do you like/dislike winter? 

If you wish to enter a drawing for a free book, and you live within the United States, here's what you do. Please tell someone about my blog, http://lindaoconnell.blogspot.com.

Ask them to sign on to "follow" my blog. They don't ever have to return, but it would be great if they did.

That person should tell me who "sent" them, and I will put both your name and theirs into the hat for a book drawing on NEXT Sunday, January 18th. If I get more than ten followers, I will do a second drawing, so that would be four books to be signed, and one sent possibly to YOU. Thank you for your participation and help. 

Titles to choose from (my stories included in each of these):

Not Your Mother's Book...On Family (co created by me)
Not Your mother's Book...On Travel
Not Your Mother's Book... On Home Improvement

Chicken Soup for the Soul, Home Sweet Home
Chicken Soup for the Soul, Living with Alzheimer's and Other Dementias
Chicken Soup for the Soul, Just Us Girls
Chicken Soup for the Soul The Dating Game
Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Power of Positive
Chicken Soup for the Soul, Reader's Choice
Chicken Soup for the Gardener's Soul (my first CS published story)  

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.