The Cardboard Wall Bedroom

The Cardboard Wall Bedroom

For a couple of winters we slept in a shanty that Dad had built on the back of the house. It had only one wooden screen door with a spring that would bang the door shut. At night we would put a blanket over the screen door to help keep it a little warmer inside. The bedroom was framed with 2X2 lumber, and the walls were made of cardboard. It had a dirt floor with straw covering the dirt. It was big enough that we could all sleep in it. We would sleep on the floor with a blanket under us and lots of blankets on top of us.

I remember when it got really cold in the winter Mom would put so many blankets on top of us that weight became so heavy we could not even roll over. I learned to get my head under the covers so my ears and nose wouldn’t freeze. I would snuggle down under the blankets and then form a small “blanket tunnel” from my mouth to the outside so I could breathe fresh air. Sometimes when we woke up in the morning there would be frost in that tunnel and on top of the blankets.

We would wake up in the mornings to sub-zero temperatures. Dad would almost always be the first to get up. He would go into the house and start a fire in the wood burning stove in the kitchen and then come to get us up. We would get up, jump out of bed, grab a blanket to throw over our shoulders, (it was so cold in there), put on our shoes, run for the screen door of the cardboard bedroom, open it to go outside, run up a step or two, (about 10 feet away) open the door to the house and run into the kitchen. We would sit on a chair next to the stove with a blanket over us until the house heated up enough to get us warm. We generally had a warm dish of oatmeal or pancakes for breakfast in the winter time. The cardboard bedroom stayed up until after the house was remodeled.