Our house was cold and drafty downstairs, roasting hot upstairs in the bedrooms. We slept with the windows open, even when it was 20 below zero. I shivered reading on the couch but had come to believe that if I so much as touched the thermostat, the furnace might explode.

"Put on a sweater if you're cold," we were told, but our clothes were almost wholly inadequate for the climate. The move from Missouri to Minnesota took years to adjust to. My mother wore a silk scarf over her head in the bitterness of January. The older kids refused to wear hats, worried about mussing their hair. The house wasn't well-insulated: The windows grew thick with hairy frost, and I pressed my finger against the glass to make patterns. The melted frost ran down the pane into the sill, where it refroze in opaque lumps. The radiators clanked and clanged as the furnace pushed out heat — heat that flew out the bedroom windows, leaked under the door jambs, rose through the roof, leached through the gray clapboard walls.

"Listen to that," our father would say. "Listen to how hard that furnace is working." He'd look around for a culprit: "For God's sake, shut that door!" But to me, the noise was a comfort, a background that meant security and warmth. When the furnace was silent, the house didn't sound right. I would quietly open a window to make it kick up again.

We tobogganed down the church hill and built snowmen in the yard and walked to Longview to skate, the wooden floor of the unheated clubhouse grooved by a thousand blades. My breath came out in white puffs as I struggled to pull the laces tight on too big, hand-me-down skates. I wobbled onto the ice and lurched back and forth; the only way to stop was to slide into a snowbank.

One winter I sat on the dining room floor, paging through the World Book Encyclopedia, when I happened across pictures of Eskimos. Their igloos looked cozy, fur rugs on the ice, a hole in the dome to let out smoke from a fire. I read about how the Eskimos built them, cutting squares of ice and stacking them, and then I sneaked a butter knife from the kitchen and went out into the yard.

With the knife, I sliced through the snow to make my own blocks, but the snow crumbled and I grew frustrated — why won't this work? The knife slipped from my numb fingers and disappeared through the drift to the frozen invisible ground.

I panicked as I searched; nobody knew I had borrowed it. I was messing around where I didn't belong, taking things that didn't belong to me! My breath came faster, my mittens were soaking, the snow was up my sleeve and down my boots, I was shivering, I could not find the knife, I was going to be killed.

I'll get it in the spring, I finally thought, and the idea filled me with peace. In the spring, when the snow melts, I'll be the first out the door and I'll find the knife and I'll wash it off and put it back in the drawer and nobody will ever know. Or they will know, I'll be the hero; I found that knife that has been missing all this time.

I went inside, kicked off my boots, pulled off my soggy mittens and laid them on the red-hot radiator, rubbed my cold, red toes, and waited for spring.

Spring came, and with it mud and grass and birdsong, and I remembered to go out and look — and look — and look. But I didn't find the knife; it remained one of the miracles of my childhood. What had happened to it? Where did it go? It was as if it had become part of our yard, part of the world, melting into the ground along with the snow.

Laurie Hertzel is the senior editor for books at the Star Tribune and author of the memoir "News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist," published by the University of Minnesota Press and winner of a Minnesota Book Award.