Adele Ferguson - Some winter survival advice

IT WAS WITH an enormous sigh of relief that I and mine all got though Thanksgiving without any kind of disaster or turmoil.

People complain about January as their low point of the year but I don’t know how many times through the years that if some problem arises, it is on or about Thanksgiving. Two Thanksgivings I spent in the emergency ward waiting for the doctors to get around to patching up my husband who on one occasion fell on the deck and cut his head and on another had an asthma attack that required hospitalization.

It has not been unusual for the weather to be so bad, wind mostly, that we had to skip a family Thanksgiving get together of my husband and myself with our two daughters at one house or other. Each of us lives about an hour away from each of the other two. Once, all three of our homes were powerless at the same time.

I don’t complain much about the weather. If it weren’t for the weather I wouldn’t be living in this beautiful place where I can see Jefferson, Island and Snohomish Counties from my deck. Mount Baker is dead ahead. And there’s a whole string of mountains east from there on around the corner in Snohomish County.

WE BOUGHT this place from a couple who didn’t tolerate power outages well and they had them all the time, what with our road densely forested. The living room has a big fireplace with glass doors but that doesn’t generate enough heat for the whole house. After the wife crouched in front of the fireplace for two weeks once to keep warm one winter they threw in the towel and put the place on the market. We bought it and they moved to downtown Bainbridge Island where power outages are few and far between. We lived here a few years, enduring a half dozen power outages or more every year, the longest lasting five days, before we decided to do something about it.

We bought a generator but more important, we bought a Fisher Goldilocks Stove, a little stove with a cooking surface on top that fit in the kitchen nicely and heats the whole house when lit off. We only use it when the power goes out.

We are also fortunate in that we have gravity flow water so we don’t have to haul that during outages. I keep on hand the kind of food you can heat up on the woodstove like chili and canned spaghetti and meatballs etc. Chef Boyardee is delicious.

MY HUSBAND used to put plasterboard around the refrigerator in the kitchen to deflect the heat of the woodstove but mostly on such occasions I take the vegetables out of the refer and put them on the back porch which, while enclosed, stays cold with the inner door shut. The house can smell of cabbage after awhile but we learned to live with it.

I have a selection of lanterns, both kerosene and battery, plus some of those glass enclosed candle burners. I soon learned to buy only old fashioned wick candles that don’t smoke because the smoke dirtied up the drapes in no time at all. I never use an open candle. I’ve written too many stories for the newspaper about families where someone left a candle burning by itself without a cover and somebody died in the fire it ignited.

I also do not remove the ashes from my wood stove until they are cold, cold, cold. And I put them in a paper sack or cardboard box and place it far away from the house. Too many stories about families that put their ashes container just out the back door taught me that. I’ll never forget the young service family in downtown Bremerton who put a sack of ashes on the porch and died in the fire it ignited, along with their baby.

Take heed. Two things will kill you if you don’t respect and use them properly. Fire and water. Happy holidays.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)