Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm by Mardi Jo Link Page B

feeding us over the winter that I haven’t given enough thought to how we’re going to stay warm. We have a perfectly good furnace; I thought we’d just use that—until I saw what heat costs. I should have listened to the Prognosticator.
    When I was my sons’ ages, heat was never a problem. I remember being so warm as a girl. As if there were a tiny furnace inside ofme, generating just the right amount of heat in my body regardless of what the elements were doing outside of it.
    There I am, decades ago in my burnt-orange bathing suit, diving off the end of my grandparents’ dock, over and over again.
    The sun is starting to go down and all the other kids are on shore shivering. My brother and my cousins are trembling inside their beach towels, but mine sits folded on the dock and I don’t even feel the cold. The lake is mine.
    I put my palms together, point them toward the dark and unknowable center of the earth, and dive. My arms are pale, freckled, stick-thin. But underwater, they are ablaze.
    “C’mon, Mard,
right now
. It’s time to go up. It’s getting dark.”
    My mother is only momentarily exasperated. She’s proud of me, I know, because she was a girl raised among boys too, once. She knows the singular joy of outlasting them. Of outswimming them, of outrunning them, of outthrowing them, and of hitting a baseball so hard they can’t catch it.
    I pull myself onto the dock, stand up dripping, and my mother leads us on our walk up the steep hill to our grandparents’ house. I’m right behind her, pine needles sticking to the undersides of my bare feet. “Warm as bathwater,” I say over my shoulder to the shivering boys, my towel draped over my arm.
    Soon enough the image is gone and I’m right back to our gas bill. “To Avoid Shutoff Send Payment Immediately.” And then the company tagline at the bottom of the bill: “Comfort and Efficiency for $3 a Day!” Only a couple of bucks for heat. That seems completely doable. And yet I have fallen behind even on this.
    Our clothes dryer, our hot-water heater, and our ancient furnace all run on natural gas. I’ve set the furnace at fifty-five degrees; just warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing. We can hangclothes out on the line even in winter and they will eventually dry. I’ve encouraged the boys to take showers at school after gym class whenever they can. If we need hot water for other things, we can boil it on the electric stove, but we are going to need an alternate source for heat.
    Please God, help me think of something
.
    This should not be an insurmountable problem. Humans have been figuring out ways to keep themselves warm for thousands of years. I am an educated adult woman in possession of a perfectly good journalism degree, and I should be able to figure it out, too.
    The three boys put their cereal bowls in the sink, put on their winter gloves, and head for the TV in the family room and Saturday-morning cartoons.
    I burn the heat bill in the fireplace and watch the exclamation point turn to ash. Alternatives. I need alternatives and I need them now. The tiny furnace inside of me isn’t enough today, and even though my sons don’t complain, I know they are cold.
    The worst part? It’s only the middle of November. Winter hasn’t even started yet.
    By afternoon the sun is out and the temperature climbs to almost sixty degrees. If you don’t like Michigan’s weather, the saying goes, just wait a minute. And if I don’t like whatever problem is confronting me, I can just wait a minute for that to change, too. A new one is bound to be along shortly.
    This is an unusually warm day for this late in the season, but not unheard of, and so I know it’s not an answer to my prayer, it’s just a temporary reprieve. Still, I might as well take advantage.
    I open up all of the windows in the house, because it is actuallywarmer outside than it is inside. The boys must be getting used to me doing things that go against convention, because while