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This Cold House

By Elizabeth Gilbert

NYT Feb. 9, 1997

My father grew up in northern New York State. My mother grew up in northern Minnesota. In my father’s town, they used to say that there were only three seasons: July, August and winter. In my mother’s town, winter blizzards were so savage that cows froze to death. Which is to say, my parents are tough people. When they married, they settled in northern Connecticut, a location that must have seemed positively tropical to them after their upbringings.

In 1973, they bought a shaggy, 150-year-old farmhouse. My grandmother wept the day we moved in.

”How could you?” she accused my father. ”How could you bring your beautiful wife and children into this house?”

Much of the roof was missing. The water supply was sporadic, there were possums living in the basement, the grass was taller than I was. Therefore, one of my father’s first acts of home improvement was to remove all the radiators from the upstairs bedrooms. This was to save on heating costs.

Four years later, my big sister, Catherine, would win a local essay contest with the topic ”How My Family Saves Energy.” Catherine, age 11, would write confidently, ”We hope to become a completely energy conservative family! During our first winter here, we spent more than 336 dollars on 828 gallons of fuel oil. This last winter, we spent nothing on fuel oil! The bedrooms are not heated, and sometimes we get below zero. Surprisingly, they are quite comfortable.”

 

The bedrooms were not, actually, quite comfortable. Clothes stored in my bedroom froze crunchy. Frost collected in the window corners like sawdust. Getting out of bed in the morning was like stepping into a meat locker. People couldn’t believe how we lived. People made jokes about our cold house, about our scrappy little farm and our rough life. We made no sense to people.

 

But then, one January day when I was about 7 years old, it started to rain.

It must have rained for a week. We lived on a road called South Plains — a swampy stretch of lowlands considerably below the hilly center of town. The Bantam River (a sweet little thing) passed right by us. It might seem grand to call South Plains a river valley, but that’s exactly what it was, as we all discovered that January when it wouldn’t stop raining.

The sweet little Bantam River rose. She outgrew her banks, she outgrew her bridges. She flooded the entirety of South Plains. Our neighborhood became a long lake. At last, late one afternoon, the rain stopped. The skies cleared, the sun set. That night, the temperature dropped below freezing. And so it happened that our neighborhood had become a vast acreage of sterling ice. Pipes broke, power was lost. South Plains had no heat! South Plains had no hot water!

Well. In our house, at least, we did not panic.

My parents dressed us warmly. We put on skates. As a family, we skated down our driveway and over to the horse stables across the highway. We skated through the pastures and skated over the dirt roads and skated easily over the meadows. There was no reason to stop skating, since the ice did not stop. And so we skated right into the woods.

The woods had also been flooded with water, which was now fantastic ice. The ice was shimmering black in some places and other places was clear and magnifying as a lens. Rain had frozen on the trees, sealing them up as if they were glassed. We skated on and on. I could see the figures of my family, glancing quick and smooth around all the trees and branches.

 

The cold snap did not lift for a week. Every day we skated through the forest. Certainly nobody was in those woods with us. Which is a pity, because people should have seen us then. We made a very elegant sight. Like a ballet. This memory is so thrilling to me that it reads to me like myth sometimes. Did we really do that?

Still, I absolutely do remember what it was like skating back toward our house. The other houses on our street looked so stricken that week. The other houses looked like slapped faces. But not our house, not that week. The insulated walls, the wood smoke, the little barn full of chickens and hay and warm goats — all this gave out a look of practical and assured preparedness. For once, you could see that very clearly about our house, particularly as you gazed up to it on skates. Our house seemed to bend the very cold and glinting air around it, like a small cloud of heat.

 

 

 

 

 

I Live on the Edge

By Tillena Trebon

NYT May 12, 2017

I live on the edge.

I live at the place where trees curl into bushes to escape the wind. My home is the slippery place between the suburbs and stone houses and hogans.

I see the evolution of the telephone poles as I leave the reservation, having traveled with my mom for her work. The telephone poles on the reservation are crooked and tilted with wire clumsily strung between them. As I enter Flagstaff, my home, the poles begin to stand up straight. On one side of me, nature is a hobby. On the other, it is a way of life.

I live between a suburban land of plenty and a rural land of scarcity, where endless skies and pallid grass merge with apartment complexes and outdoor malls.

I balance on the edge of drought.

In the summers, when the rain doesn’t come, my father’s truck kicks dust into the air. A layer of earthy powder settles over the wildflowers and the grass. The stale ground sparks ferocious wildfires. Smoke soars into the air like a flare from a boat lost at sea. Everyone prays for rain. We fear that each drop of water is the last. We fear an invasion of the desert that stretches around Phoenix. We fear a heat that shrivels the trees, turns them to cactuses.

 

I exist at the epicenter of political discourse. Fierce liberalism swells against staunch conservatism in the hallways of my high school and on the streets of the downtown.

When the air is warm, the shops and restaurants open their doors. Professionals in suits mingle with musicians and artists sporting dreadlocks and ripped jeans. Together, they lament the drought, marvel at the brevity of the ski season.

I live on the edge of an urban and rural existence.

At my mother’s house, we ride bikes down paved streets. We play catch with the neighbor kids. We wage war with water guns.

At my father’s house, we haul water. We feed the horses and chickens. We chase the fox away from the chicken coop. We watch deer grazing, not ten yards away. We turn the soil in the garden. When the rain and the soil and the sun and the plants give birth to fruit, we eat it straight from the vines.

Traditional Navajo weaving and prints of Picasso’s paintings adorn the walls of both homes.

I straddle the innocence of my youth and the mystery of my adult life. That, too, is a precipice. I know I must leap into adulthood and leave the balancing act of Flagstaff life behind. Still, I belong at the place where opposites merge in a lumpy heap of beautiful contradictions. I crave the experiences only found at the edge. As I dive into adulthood, into college, I hope that I can find a new place that fosters diversity in all its forms, a new edge upon which I can learn to balance.

Name: 5/16

1. Read “This Cold House.” Find three examples of sensory details (imagery).

Quote #1:

Quote #2:

Quote #3:

2. What is the effect of the vivid imagery in “This Cold House”? How does this idea of “freezing a moment in time” make for a compelling personal essay? The effect of the vivid imagery in “This Cold House” is

3. Read “I Live on the Edge.” How does the writer’s organization help convey meaning?

4. What does the writer mean by “I Live on the Edge” and what does this reveal about the writer’s character?

5. Like Tillena Trebon’s “I Live on the Edge,” write about two worlds you balance in your everyday life. Use sensory details (imagery) to enhance your writing. Respond in 250-500 words.