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Garrison, Up here in Fargo,

February 8, 2005 |

Garrison,
Up here in Fargo, it's twenty-five below and I am trying to look on the bright side.

1. When it's this cold, you can't feel the shock from an electric fence. Of course, the cows can't either, so that might be a down side.

2. You can't feel yourself getting cut when your freezing cold, AND you won't bleed to death either because the blood freezes. I had a friend in grade school who came in after an afternoon of playing with us in the freezing cold and found she had ripped her snowpants going over a barbed wire fence. She had cut her thigh 4" deep and 13" long and didn't even feel it. My mom just put a dishtowel full of snow on it to keep it from thawing and drove her to town to get stitches. My friend was happy that her mom didn't even care about the torn snowpants, the stitches in her leg were that impressive. Maybe that's how they first discovered local anesthesia — I don't know. I also had a great uncle who was running a high fever and the family thought he had died so they put him out in the shed. The cold brought down his fever and he came walking back into the house 4 hours later ... wondering what the heck he was doing in the shed.

Bye,
Alice Barefoot

Alice, the story about the playmate leaves me feeling slightly faint, but the resurrection story is beautiful and I am going to remember it and use it someday. Those ancestors of yours certainly must have had a matter-of-fact view of death to stick the body out in the shed so promptly. Or maybe they didn't care for that great-uncle so much and the thought of his demise was not entirely unpleasant to them.

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