The first hard freeze came the second week of November last year, and by the time I walked from the house to the barn at 5:30 AM the thermometer on the gate post read eleven below. My hands knew before I did. The arthritis in my fingers sets up like concrete in that kind of cold, and opening the latch on the hay barn door took both hands and about thirty seconds of bargaining with joints that did not want to bend.
The back was worse. It is always worse in winter. The cold gets into the disc and the muscles around it tighten down like they're trying to protect something that can't be protected. By the time I had the tractor started and the first round bale on the loader, my lower back had gone from stiff to sharp. That is a distinction a person with a bad back learns to read the way a rancher reads clouds — not because it's interesting, but because what comes next depends on it.
I am not the only one. Karen substitutes at the school in Kaycee and she says the teachers with bad knees and shoulders all move different in January. My mother, who is eighty-seven and in assisted living in Buffalo, says her hands hurt worse from October to March than the whole rest of the year. I do not know whether it is the cold itself or the barometric pressure or the fact that a body moves less when moving hurts. Probably all three.
What changes for me in winter is everything. In summer, I apply the topical salve once in the morning and sometimes again after lunch if the work was heavy. In winter, I start with it before I leave the house. I rub it into my lower back, both hands, and both knees. By 5:30 AM in January the salve is the only reason I can grip a gate latch at all. I reapply at noon and sometimes again at 4 PM before evening chores. In summer a jar of salve lasts three weeks. In winter it lasts about twelve days. That is the difference between thirty-five dollars a month and ninety.
The edibles change too. In summer I take a low-dose edible — 2.5 milligrams — maybe twice a week on the nights when my back won't let me lie flat. In winter it is four or five nights a week. December and January are the worst. The cold makes the muscles seize and the spasms come at night when the body finally stops moving and realizes what the day cost it. A 2.5-milligram edible at 8 PM lets me sleep five hours instead of two. Some weeks I take 5 milligrams. That is my ceiling.
The cost adds up. In summer my cannabis runs maybe fifty to sixty dollars a month. In winter it is closer to a hundred and twenty. That is real money on a ranch that breaks even in good years. But tramadol was costing me more than dollars. It was costing me cattle and clarity and the ability to do the work that keeps the place running. A hundred and twenty dollars a month to stay functional through a Wyoming winter is a number I can live with.
There are things cannabis does not fix in winter. It does not make my hands warm. It does not stop the disc from compressing when I lift a fifty-pound salt block into the back of the truck at ten below. It does not change the fact that a sixty-two-year-old body with forty years of wear on it will move slower in January than it does in June. What it does is narrow the gap. The difference between a bad winter day without the salve and a bad winter day with it is the difference between finishing chores and not finishing them.
I have talked to a few people at the dispensary in Billings who say the same. A carpenter from Laurel said his shoulder pain doubles between Thanksgiving and March. A woman at a grain elevator switched from smoking to edibles in winter because the cold air on top of the smoke made her chest tight. People figure out what works. They adjust.
It does not take a study to know that winter makes pain worse. Anyone who has started a tractor at twenty below with a bad back already knows. But it is worth saying plainly: winter is harder, it costs more, and the people who live through it deserve to know what is available to them.
Nobody is going to stop the cold from coming. The question is what a person does about it when it gets here.