My name is Willy Makit and I am 106 years old today, February 24, 2020. I was born and grew up on a farm on the Indiana prairie. One of my earliest memories is of what happened on the night of my sixth birthday, exactly 100 years ago today. In this book, I will tell you the tale of that cold and frightful night.

Today, of course, everyone has central heat and air conditioning, running water, electric lights and appliances, cars, TVs, and so on. Life is easy and very comfortable.

But it wasn't like that a hundred years ago. We didn't have any of that stuff. Life was hard.

It was hotter than the dickens in the summer and those cold winters could chill you to the bone, whether you were indoors or out.

We had to haul water up from the well to the house in heavy oaken buckets and then had to heat it on the wood-burning stove so we could do the laundry or take a bath. I took one every Saturday night, whether I needed it or not. Well, most weeks, anyway.

In the winter, we also heated the house with that wood-burning stove, which was in the living room. We had another one in the kitchen for cooking. And that was it, as far as heat goes. The rest of the house would get very cold, especially at night.

I slept upstairs on a squeaky old iron bed, and in the winter I would pile it high with blankets and quilts. It took a while to get warm under all those blankets, and once I did get warm I wanted to stay there.

Sometimes, it would get so cold at night that I would have to put on a sweater or two, then my winter coat, a pair of mittens, and two or three pairs of socks to keep warm. But on the coldest nights, it never seemed to be enough. I would just lay there and hope that morning would arrive before I froze to death.

Oh, yeah, there's one more thing I forgot to mention. Since we didn't have indoor plumbing, we would have to go out to the outhouse when we had to go.

And, because it smelled so bad out there, it was situated way out in the backyard, a good forty yards away from the house by my reckoning.

Well, to get back to my story, I had a very good birthday that year. Mama baked a cake for me and Papa made me a real nice present, a wooden choo-choo train. What fun I had!

As luck would have it, my birthday fell on a Tuesday that year, so I didn't have to take a bath. Whew! That was good, because it was unusually cold that night, about 10 or 15 degrees below zero, if I remember correctly. Grandpa told me later that it was so cold that night he could hear his teeth chattering on the nightstand. Ha! What a hoot!

Well, when bedtime came, I trudged reluctantly up the stairs to that freezing bedroom. I piled every blanket and quilt I could find onto that bed and then hopped in, shivering uncontrollably.

I couldn't fall asleep that night because it was so cold. My fingers and toes were freezing, despite the socks and mittens I had put on, and I couldn't get them to warm up, no matter how hard I tried. So I just lay there for about an hour, wishing that morning would hurry up and get there.

And then, all of a sudden, I had to go. It wasn't too bad at first, but the longer I lay there, the more I had to go. And after a while, I really had to go. And then I really, really had to go. But it was not until I really, really, REALLY had to go that I finally decided that it was time to make that desperate dash to the outhouse.

Well, if I had to go, I was not going to go alone. Back in those days, there were a lot of wild animals out on the prowl at night. Coyotes. Wolves. Bears. Lions? Tigers? Well, maybe not, but who knew for sure? After all, I was only six years old.

"Hey, Charlie!" I whispered to my dog, "Let's go outside." Now, normally, he loved going outside, but that night it was so cold that he whimpered and whined like a baby. I put on my boots and gloves and my heaviest coat and together we walked to the door. We both shuddered when I cracked it open and felt the first blast of that cold winter air.

The snow was deep, up to my knees in most places and even higher in drifts here and there. And it was still coming down. About ten yards from the house, Charlie turned around and ran back to the door. I took pity on him and went back to let him in, then retraced my steps and continued on my way to that faraway outhouse.