Five ways to tell it's winter in a country farm house

The years have a way of making technology lose its luster and bluster. And so do the centuries. When my Michigan farmhouse was built, the latest in on-line hardware was a telegraph key. With that, a hayseed hacker might've tapped out a Morse code missive to the White House -- which was then occupied by President Abraham Lincoln.

We've lived in our two-story brick home for 16 years and have spent more money to renovate the place than we did to buy it. As for the technological upgrades, they've been more third-world than world class. In lieu of gadgets, we've added heat registers; electrical outlets; a flush toilet, clothes closets; and (my favorite) windows that actually open. The upstairs had none of these FDR-era amenities when we moved in.

Even now, in some rooms and corners, it still feels like 1860. There's a certain wilderness within that will not be tamed, no matter how we try to refurbish the house into submission. It's a primal force, an indwelling native spirit that refuses to yield. You feel it whenever the hawkish winter wind keens around the eaves and rattles the 12-pane windows. You see it personified in the tree-trunk floor posts, their bark still on, that stand like petrified sentinels in the cobble stone Michigan basement.

When I was younger, stronger and dumber, I figured to have everything modernized in three, maybe four years, tops. Now I know it's a battle I'll never win -- and perhaps am not meant to. As long as I'm here, I've decided to leave some regions of the house forever wild. Which is to say cold, dark, dirt-floored, unpainted and congenial to over-wintering rodents. From December to late March, that means the outdoors will often be as close as the next room. Although even without a calendar, here's five ways to tell that winter has come to stay:

You can see your breath in the back living room: Officially -- here's the irony -- it wasn't called a living room but a summer kitchen. Meals were cooked there during hot weather, so that the main kitchen's woodstove wouldn't overheat the house. Our summer kitchen was built above a dirt-floored crawl space. I went down there once to insulate and got briefly and terrifyingly stuck between the hand-hewn timber beams and the bare earth. (It struck me then as the kind of dark, forgotten cavity where a serial killer would hide dismembered body parts.) Anyway, we've since made it a comfortable living room and added a cheery, wood-burning fireplace. When it's ablaze, we can raise the temperature to near 70. During the week, when there's no fire, temps hover in the upper 20s. The bright side? It's yet to snow out there and there's virtually no wind chill.

Your propane gas bill is higher than the mortgage payment: OK, I've admitted it publicly, but refuse to disclose more details than that. So please: don't try to sell me on geothermal heat pumps, solar panels, windmills, corn burners, wood pellet burners, methane gas digesters, or -- especially -- outdoor wood-fired boilers like my brother has. There's tradeoffs and complicating factors to all these that make the costs shake out about equally. Suffice to say that you've got to pay through the nose to keep your feet warm in an historic domecile. Living in the past ain't as cheap as it used to be.

The Mouse Drawer has full occupancy: To keep all rodents out of a 19th century farm house, you'd have to encase it in concrete blast walls like those around the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Absent that, and because my three indolent cats could care less, I've become the resident mouser. It's a typical case of asymmetrical warfare. I come armed with my human hubris and conventional American weaponry -- i.e. traps baited with peanut butter (crunchy works better than creamy). And the mice, like militant peasants everywhere, know and own the local terrain. I'm an invading infidel whose been here a mere 15 years. Their kind, thousands of generation's worth, have occupied this porous-walled homeland for 160 years.

I usually trap 6-7 under the kitchen sink, after the cold weather has driven them indoors in the fall. Then after those early victories, a defiant little band retreats to the dreaded Mouse Drawer. It's a narrow rectangle of impregnable high ground just left of the stove, a Khyber Pass where all my attempts at homeland defense meet with futility. We do keep some old utensils there, but my wife considers them accursed and unclean. Trust me: no measure of disinfection could render them touchable. The chilling phrase, "That came from ... the Mouse Drawer?" ends all discussion about the topic.

The storeroom doubles as a refrigerator: This one's more a convenience than a detriment. Don't have enough room to cool a six-pack of beer or few liters of pop? Got a big leftover kettle of soup that's still too hot to set in the refrigerator? Or bags of apples, baskets of summer squash, bundles of sweet onions and clumps of dried dill and basil? Then let winter work for you for a change. Transform (probably too grand a word) your store room/mud room, garage into a walk-in cooler. Yes, you've got to overcome the prudish, bourgeoisie notion that it's unseemly to store edibles next to a volleyball net or rusty tool box. But what's the difference between 35 degrees in a refrigerator and 35 degrees in a mudroom? You think the food cares? Besides, we've had no problems out there with mice; they'd rather stay in the main house where it's warm.

The reign and ruin of the icicle kingdom: As earlier mentioned, old houses leak heat the way press secretaries leak scurrilous news tips. When heat migrates to a cooler surface it surrenders its latent energy to cause condensation. On a glass of iced tea in June, that process raises those delightful beads that trickle down to dampen your drink coaster. On a steel roof in January, it melts the snow to form rivulets of distilled water that drip from the eaves and form icicles. Everyone loves how they look; elegant cylinders of tapered crystalline that refract the clear winter sun like fine quartz. Even the melodious drip, drip, drip can be a meditation on a drowsy Sunday afternoon.

Under the right conditions, I've seen icicles that are six-feet long and as big around as a girl's waist. We grow them that big in the L-shaped crook of our house. And there they hang, homicidal stalactites on the cliffs of doom. Until, at about 1 a.m. on some foggy February night, they crash and boom to earth like calving icebergs in a Norwegian fjord. Startling in the extreme, but not altogether unwelcome. It's simply the Lord's own water music, come to tell the old house that winter has loosened its icy grasp once more.