January has long been one of my unfavorite months.

From the time I was growing up on the ranch, I’ve dreaded the snow and cold. That’s not to say that February and March were so great either.

My feet got so cold that it felt as if they were made of wood. Even now I keep thinking “if I can just get through January.”

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Living at a high elevation at the ranch, we got a lot of snow, and when the wind blew, it drifted. We didn’t have a very good way to plow snow around the ranch, compared to these days, so it was hard to get around. I don’t remember much about the condition of the road that ran past our house, but the county must have kept it cleared most of the time because we got mail.

However, in 1949, the snow drifted so deep that they had to bring in special graders to cut through it, and that year the mail was sometimes delivered on horseback.

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We didn’t go to Craig very often in January, but we did go to school. The teacher lived in the teacherage next to the school so she was always there. The school was just down the road from our house so my siblings and I walked to school.

Dad must have made us a path when the snow was deep, but sometimes he took us to school on horseback or on the feed sled since that was the time he fed the main cow herd.

Christmas ended, and we got into a January routine. It was cold when we got up, but we bundled up and went to the outhouse out past the backyard and on the other side of a ditch. We had no inside bathroom, no electricity and no phone in those early years.

Back in the house, we washed up, ate breakfast and brushed our teeth. We girls wore dresses to school so we pulled pants on underneath and bundled up in layers of clothes, ready to go to school.

Dad did the chores at the corral in the mornings so we could get ready for school. Somebody fed and watered the chickens. The chicken water had to be checked during the day, too, since the chicken house wasn’t heated.

At school we did our lessons, and, if the weather permitted, we played outside during recess. When school was out, we walked home, ate a snack and got ready to do evening chores, including taking care of the chickens. Mom always had a hot, nutritional meal ready for us.

In the early years, when we had no electricity, the light came from a lantern on the dining room table. There was no TV, phone or electronic devices as today so we visited as a family and listened to a battery-powered radio.

I remember “Gunsmoke.”

When it was time for bed, we used a lantern to get upstairs, and we had a flashlight on hand in case we had to visit the outhouse during the night.

That’s how we got through the January days, but we had lots of activities to keep us busy when we weren’t in school or doing chores, and that’s the focus of next week’s column.