Winter Stories

In 2013, I wrote. THE QUIET SEASON: REMEMBERING COUNTRY WINTERS. After the book was published, I believed that people who knew anything at all about winter, and that included a bunch of folks besides me, would not read it. How wrong I was.

People love telling their winter stories, sharing the cold temperatures they remembered, how the snow was so deep it came up to the telephone wires, when roads were blocked with snow drifts for sometimes more than a week. People have liked comparing their winter stories with mine.

For instance, I wrote about how on a cold wintry Monday wash day, my mother , using a wringer washing machine powered by a Briggs and Stratton gasoline engine, washed clothes. That is, after Pa spent an hour cussing at the little engine that insisted on not starting. After running the clothes through the ringer, my mother hung them outside, on clothes lines that began near the outhouse, and nearly reached to the woodshed.

Within a few minutes everything on the clothes line froze stiff, from the long underwear to the blue denim overalls. When I arrived home from school, mother had fetched the frozen clothes from the line, and stood the long underwear and overalls around the kitchen. It looked ever so much like we had company, albeit they all looked a little stiff and lacking in words.

Winter was a time for resting, just as the grape vines in this photo are resting, waiting for the snow to melt and spring to arrive.

The Old Timer Says: What would people have to talk about if there was no winter?

ANNOUNCEMENT: There is still time to join my new internet book club.. And you don’t have to leave home to participate. Go to www.jwappsauthor.com for details. It begins February 1 and will feature my first novel, THE TRAVELS OF INCREASE JOSEPH (historical fiction about Wisconsin)

UPCOMING EVENTS:

February 5, 11:45-12:30. Larry Meiller Show, Public Radio. We’ll be discussing my books: Once a Professor, and Simple Things: Lessons From the Family Farm.

February 9, 2:15 Garden Expo, Alliant Center, Madison “Ten Simple Things I’ve Learned From Fifty years of gardening”

February 10, 1:00 p.m. Garden Expo, Alliant Center, Madison (Repeat topic)

February 15, 6:00 p.m. State of Wisconsin Mediation Program, Wintergreen Hotel and Cnference Center, Wisconsin Dells. After dinner speaker.

PURCHASING BOOKS AND DVDs:

Order your signed Apps books and DVDs from the Patterson Memorial Library in Wild Rose, a fundraiser for them. Phone: 920-622-3835 for prices and ordering.
Patterson Memorial Library
500 Division Street
Wild Rose, WI 54984
barnard@wildroselibrary.
www.wildroselibrary.org

Popular recent Books:

Simple Things: Lessons from the Family Farm (fun to read in winter)

Garden Wisdom (Time to begin planning for the upcoming garden season)

Old Farm Country Cookbook

The Quiet Season (All about winter)

Cold as Thunder (A look into the future)

The Travels of Increase Joseph (Historical fiction about Wisconsin before 1900)