To listen to more of Donald Hall’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFyDI47p9qm-ZJtApB_9leMl
US Poet Laureate Donald Hall (1928-2018) published essays and anthologies of both poetry and prose including "String too Short to be Saved: Recollections of Summers on a New England Farm", and "Ox-Cart Man", a children's book which won the Caldecott Medal. [Listener: Kendel Currier; date recorded: 2005]
TRANSCRIPT: We were so happy here... to be here... and it was terribly cold that January - the January of '76 - it was 38 below zero Fahrenheit on the... on the porch and we had no... no double windows, no insulation of any kind, and we had that wood stove. And to make love we would just pull blankets and pillows next to the stove right there, and we would... to... to go to bed... we did have something the old people didn't have... we had electric blankets, they had hot water bottles, we had electric blankets. I would dash into the sub zero bedroom and turn on the blankets for half an hour, and then we would dash in, and Jane would just get totally under... totally under, but the blanket was pretty warm. And I wanted to read while going to sleep so I learnt to read with a cheap paperback book that I could hold in one hand and read, and then when this hand became insufferable, I'd move to the other hand and warm up the other one, so that I could read enough to go to sleep. We had a wonderful time and we wrote. We had to write in one room, the first... I mean, during the worst of it. I was writing a book about a baseball player named Dock Ellis, by that time. He's a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and he's from Los Angeles, and he came up to look over the manuscript that winter, on a day when it was warm, it was about 18 below probably, warmed up from 38 below and he had never, never experienced anything like it. He spent the night in the unheated parlour, wearing a fur hat, and fur boots. He came out of the room in the morning, and said, 'I am never going to spend another night in that room', and we got through the book quickly. He flew back the same day.
