A True Northern Winter in Comstock, Wisconsin, or is it a Warning of Things to Come?

I live in the countryside on the outskirts of Comstock, Wisconsin. It is a small community close to Turtle Lake, famous for the St. Croix Casino. Cold weather has hit us hard this year. Our propane is running out all of the time, and the furnace cannot keep up with arctic blast; it is fighting a losing battle.

I attributed all of this to living in a drafty old farmhouse in the northern part of the country during winter. Imagine how surprised I was when logging onto Facebook, I found out that many of my contacts from all over the United States are sitting at their computers, wrapped up in blankets, the same as I.

Friends and family in Minnesota are complaining about how the thermostat inside their homes are barely reaching 60 degrees. Now that may not be surprising, but a friend in Oklahoma, as well as my husband's family members in Tennessee have called about having 25 degree temperatures there all week as well. The one that has shocked me the most is my cousin, and fellow AC contributor, Stephanie Nolan, who enjoyed a White Christmas this year and wrote about in her article Mommy, We Missed Santa Claus!, residing in Texas!

Back here in Wisconsin, we were snow bound that day, instead of packing the kids up and heading back to spend the holidays with family in Minnesota, we had our own little celebration here. We will have a second with our loved ones towards the end of this month, when we hopefully get the "January Thaw".

What makes all of this so ironic is a conversation that I had with my husband this spring about it being a hard winter. I was actually reading the book "The Long Winter", part of the Little House Series by Laura Ingalls-Wilder about her childhood, at the time. It described how a Native American said that every 7 winters was a hard one and at the end of 3 times of those (21 years) it would be the worst. They were in the middle of that 21st year and faced 7 months of blizzards, extreme cold and no way for anyone to get food, coal or other supplies out to their remote town. They lived on two pieces of brown toast a piece and two cups of tea a day for months after they ran out of everything else. Now we have not had as bad of blizzard conditions yet that were in those chapters, but we do have the cold. Thank goodness we do not rely on trains for supplies anymore, or coal for heat but as I sit here typing these words, I would give anything for a wood fireplace to warm in front of.

We live eight miles from town and even with my fearless husband driving his four-wheel-drive truck, there have been nights that we could not make the trip due to the visibility hazards and icy road conditions. We are lucky to never have went hungry but we have went without little things here and there. I joke with my husband, who grew up in Tennessee and moved up here the spring after the famous 1991 blizzard, that this is his first taste of a real northern winter. But I am not sure if I have ever experienced this cold either, the kind that seems to settle into your bones and never leave.

On clear days, the drive into town is beautiful, the lake frozen over, the trees glistening with ice, the winter's creatures bounding through the snow. I can not help but think though, that if 1991 was the "21st winter" the legend talks about, then we are not even experiencing a small taste of what is to come. That one will come three years from now, in the year that everyone seems to be talking about, the year 2012.