Man, you guys don't know what cold is. Where I grew up, it was so cold, if the thermometer had been just a little bit longer, we would all have been dead. I remember on school mornings, I would get up, put on my skates, and go to the bathroom. When I turned the shower on, it would hail. I'd hurry to get dressed, grab my flannel notebook, and head out the door. I had to kick a hole in the air just to get outside. If it was foggy, the fog would freeze and I had to tunnel my way to school. At school, all the kids were telling these outrageous and incredible lies, hoping their pants would actually catch on fire. Nobody threw spitballs because someone could have been killed. On the way home from school, it would sometimes take me two hours to walk one block, because my shadow kept freezing to the sidewalk. I tried to pick it up so I could keep on going, but it shattered. One day I thought I had a rock rattling around in my boot, but when I stopped and took it off, it was just one of my toes. I used to go out of my way and walk by the park on the way home just to watch the squirrels throwing themselves at an electric fence. Snowflakes would freeze in the air. Sometimes the squirrels would jump from a tree onto the snowflakes, and then leap onto the electric fence. When I'd get bored with the smell of fried squirrel fur, I'd start walking again. Once I saw a hitchhiker holding up a picture of his thumb. When I'd get to our driveway, I'd grab the mail out of the box on the way in, but it would always break before I got to the house with it. We couldn't read our newspaper until it thawed out. The publishers started making up the news and printing the papers a day early so we could read them on time. Sometimes they were right. When I finally walked through the door, I couldn't speak. My words just froze in mid-air. I had to gather up all the sentences, take them to the fireplace, and thaw them out before anyone could hear me. Mom always had chores waiting for me when I got home. She'd tell me to take out the garbage, but it didn't want to go. I'd get mad at it and make an ugly face, and it really did stay that way. I guess mom was right after all. At dinner time, she used to put frozen pizza in the oven. 25 minutes later we ate frozen pizza. Sometimes, flames would freeze in the fireplace. Mom would break them off, grind them up, and we'd use them for seasoning on our frozen pizza. For dessert, we had Jello crunch. I could eat all the ice cream I wanted to eat, as fast as I wanted to eat it, and still not get brain freeze. If I got sick, mom would give me either a block of chicken soup or a Nyquil popsicle before bed. If I peed my jammies, Dad would have to chisel them off me. When it was bedtime, I got to stay up late because I always had to wait for the pee in my jammies to thaw out from the night before. I remember I used to go to sleep by candlelight, but one night the flame on the candle froze, so I threw it out the window. When it thawed out in the spring, it burnt the barn down. Aahh. The memories of my childhood.