Shall we gather at the river? In our kitchen?

It's hard to do even the most routine things when temperatures hover around zero. That includes writing a column.

I should know.

My wife and I are on pins and needles, thanks to a ruptured water pipe brought on by the minus-five nighttime reading a couple of weeks ago. That mess was quickly cleaned up, but there appears to be no guarantee that we won't have another break before the weather improves this week.

Right now we are living with water drizzling from every available faucet. All the doors to our cabinets and cupboards, particularly on outside walls, are hanging open so heated air can get close to water pipes.

We live in a house with no basement, and someone thought it was a good idea to run water pipes and heating/air-conditioning ducts through the attic.

Sure, that works just fine if the weather cooperates. But when, exactly, has the weather ever cooperated?

OK. I know a lot of you are trying to direct my attention to last winter, when we sailed through what should have been freezing days with very few temperatures below 32 degrees.

But this winter is the price we pay for that. Everything evens out eventually. That's my motto. And I'm sticking to it.

Another tip I found online regarding water pipes and freezing temperatures said to keep the thermostat set on the same temperature around the clock. I don't know about you, but we are used to turning the thermostat up a few notches during the day and down a few notches at night. We like our bedroom to be on the cool side. We have a ceiling fan that helps in that regard. But now, for fear of freezing water pipes, our nighttime thermostat is set at daytime highs, and it's not comfortable.

My wife surveyed all the cabinet doors hanging open and all the drooling faucets. Her appraisal: This is just like when I was growing up. Boy, we've come a long way!

By the way, her dad was a plumber, but we'll have to save the irony for another time.

I never thought I'd consider a nighttime low of 30 degrees to be a warm spell, but that's exactly how I feel right now. As long as the air temp stays above 25 or so, we don't have to adopt such extreme measures to avoid another frozen-pipe calamity. Bring on those balmy temperatures in the 30s. Better still, the 40s, the 50s or the 60s. Better still ... .

When I was growing up, condensation on the wallpaper in my unheated bedroom used to freeze overnight, leaving a skim of frost. But we didn't worry about frozen water pipes. That's the advantage of not having running water. What we had was running to the outhouse in the orchard. But that, too, is another story altogether.

Breaking through the ice in the water bucket on the back porch was something you expected during cold winters in the Ozarks over yonder where I grew up. No big deal. A frozen water bucket never produced an avalanche of water cascading from the light fixtures in the ceiling.

Some days -- not often -- I miss the frozen water bucket and everything else I endured growing up on a farm. But not the outhouse. Never ever.

It's interesting, isn't it? What we get worked up about at various stages of our lives? Right now I just want to get through this week's frigid weather without a repeat of an unexpected water feature in our kitchen.

Is that too much to ask?

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.