Frozen

It takes a brave woman to purposely put her hands in iced over water.

At least that is what I told myself when yesterday, I found myself using a watering can to carry water to the ducks pen.

The hose had frozen solid, a fact I discovered as I knelt in the frosty grass and leaned through the fence to turn on the tap – only to have the hose burst off, covering me in a fine spray of icy water. We won’t talk about how I tried (and failed) to reattach the hose to the tap, leaning through the fence at a right angle to the ground, supported by a strand of wire under my belly and unable to raise my head due to the live electric wires running a few inches above my head.

So there I was, stuck half on my property and half on the farm, cows watching me intently as I tried to wrestle an ice filled hose into submission.

After the first 3 fingers on my right hand had gone numb, I gave it up as a bad joke and carefully extracted myself from my perilous position.

I am proud to say I didn’t electrocute myself even a little. Which is good, because the position I was in, it would have been doubtful that I would have been able to stop electrocuting myself once started and I’m not sure that would have been any fun.

The hose dripped a little at my feet and so I kicked it. Stupid frozen thing. It retaliated by merely crunching, like a hose full of ice is apt to do.

And so I gave up and went to get the watering can instead.

There is a bathtub at the back of our garden fence, full of water. Likely a few more weeks will see it full of frog spawn, but at this point, I use it for animal water when the hoses are too frozen to work properly.

I found the watering can and headed to the bathtub, only to find it full of ice. Thick ice.

I smashed the ice with the watering can (ha! take that winter!) and then discovered that the ice was too thick to get the watering can in still, despite the smashing.

That is when I told myself, it takes a brave woman to purposely put her hands in iced water. And then I put my hands into the water and picked up the largest chunk of ice and removed it.

By this stage, all of my fingers were numb and I still had water containers to fill.

The watering can was full of ice too, an inch solid block in the bottom of it, but no matter. It was going to get filled dammit, because my warm house was calling me and I was cold.

The ducks peeped at me as I emptied their muddy iceblock that was their clean water the night before and filled up their containers. Done! I was done!

Only I wasn’t, because I hadn’t fed them yet and they were looking at me reproachfully.

I practically skipped back to the house to grab wheat, figuring faster was better.

I was brave when I put my hand into the frozen water.

I was even braver when I plunged my already numb hands into frozen wheat as I scattered it around so no one got bullied as they ate.

For the record, wheat is bitterly cold when it’s been outside all night and you should probably not put your hands in it.

I raced back to the house and fumbled my way inside, only to plunge my hands into lukewarm water.

Ow ow ow ow ow.

Defrosting hurts.