Winters were really brutal in our hometown.
I’m the kind of dad that reminds her youngsters often how difficult she had it when she was their age. I may not have walked uphill both ways to school in 5 ft of snow, but that was not so far from the truth! I lived in a small mountain town as well as attended a school with superb teachers, but not the biggest budget. Every one of us had an outdated boiler method to keep us warm while every one of us were in the coldest weeks of the year. It was a crapshoot as to whether or not it would bring any amount of warmth to any given classroom that you end up in. Let myself and others explain. The closer you were to the boiler, the faster your room would heat up. The farther away you were from the boiler, the longer it took for your room to heat up. There were a select handful of classrooms in the building where you got the best possible scenario. If you were in a classroom next to the boiler, your room would heat up really abruptly in the morning, which would be a welcome relief, until the heat started getting rather oppressive. If you were on the opposite end of the school, you would not guess any lick of warmth from that boiler until it started getting close to lunchtime, at which point you would head even farther away from the boiler to the lunch room, which for whatever reason was on the opposite end of the school, and kids in the middle of the school had the best luck, because they would get warm relatively early in the morning, as well as the heat would not be oppressive as well as would remain throughout the rest of the afternoon. Mind you, this is only when the boiler was really working!