How cold can it get? Until nothing at all can move. A bit before that, I’ll walk on water when Hell freezes over.
During a particularly harsh winter, it was so cold that my shadow froze to the ground such that I couldn’t even move. I almost died. I tried to call for help but my words came out in ice-block letters. Luckily, a passerby observed this and lit up a match to read the words—but the flame froze, and so no one could hear the words I had said until they thawed out in the spring. I left my shadow there and retreated to my cabin and drank a hot coffee that had frozen so fast that it was still warm. That night I built a fire but I had to sleep with my head in the fireplace to keep warm. I knew it was morning when I saw light at the top of the chimney. That’s how cold it was.
Times were so tough that winter that we had to made soup out of the pictures in the seed catalog, for we dared not even go out. I tried to catch a mouse by putting a picture of some cheese in a mousetrap, but all I caught was a picture of a mouse! Some days we had to go up on the roof to chop off the smoke clouds that had frozen around the chimney.
The day was so cold and windy that the fence posts blew out and all the post holes blew up onto the roof, causing leaks when it started to snow. The wind blew so hard that the sun went down three hours late. Well, this really warmed things up, and soon the snow caught on fire but then put itself out when it turned to water.
I ventured out that day to do some ice fishing, but the warmth had thawed the ice a lot and I soon fell through it and would have drowned had I not had the presence of mind to go back to shore and bring some logs out to float on and so I escaped from the ice hole. This was the very same lake I’d tried to swim across last summer. After getting halfway across I decided that I wasn’t going to make it, so I swam back. Anyway, I caught a big fish. It was so large that even its picture weighed twelve pounds!
So, I did survive that winter, or I wouldn’t be writing about it, but it wasn’t easy, but that only goes to show: Never give up. Not giving up was a lesson that I’d learned from a couple of frogs: One day two frogs fell into a pail of cow’s milk. After struggling for awhile one of the frogs soon gave up and drowned, but the other frog, our hero, kept on flailing away for hours, never giving up. The next morning, I found the frog very much alive, sitting happily atop a pail of butter.
Now, what will I do when all the stars burn out?
