Ice House Rant

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Cooperstown's first track meet of the season was: a. bitter; b. bit windy; c. dank; d. snowing! Of course it was snowing! How could it be anything else? It's merely April 5th, and we're never safe from large amounts of snow until May 26th (a date subject to change, depending on the weather...)

Questions that want answering, 
some of them vaguely literary.

How did it first come over the Coopers and other Yankees that it might be nice to live beside a beautiful but frozen lake and obtain their winter exercise by shivering?

Were these Yankees simply excessively stubborn and stalwart (and stupendously s-alliterative, like this stupid question), or were they simply in love with the landscape (which was splendiferous until the strip mall came in at the Commons?) Or was it something else entirely, not beginning with "s" at all? (Judge Cooper's patent, perhaps?)

Did the early settlers think it was profoundly weird to keep their deceased beloved's body in the ice house or wood shed all winter and then have to wait till June when the ground was thawed enough to dig a grave with pickaxes? Hmm. Might have to write something about the body in the ice house.

Why did "Real Feel" have to be 20 degrees lower than the thermometer this morning? (I'm going to quit looking at accuweather. It's too dratted depressing.) Why can't it be above for a change?

Why did James Fenimore Cooper come back from Europe? No wonder he ran off! He wanted warmth and culture and probably a corner café. There were probably very few Cooperstown corners in his time. And even fewer cafés. No Chingachgook Café. No Pathfinder Pizza. No Hawkeye Bar. No Last-of-the-Mohicans Restaurant. When he came back, he tried to drag Europe with him, as when he turned Christ Church into a Gothic treasure box. But the villagers were already terribly American. They'd taken over his favorite lakeside beach--his very own, with a family deed and everything--and wouldn't give it back. We the people still have it today!

You know what I'm tired of? Starts with an "l." Almost ends with "brr." Layers. Bonus question: You know what else I'm tired of doing? Shoveling ash.

Appropriately, the youngest and I are going to see Frozen. 

I live in a perfectly beautiful village that has no agonizing problems and am privileged to have enough to eat and central heating. But I still can't bend my mind around the idea that people lived in my house in 1808 and were cold. Very cold. Frozen, and with nothing of Disney about it at all.