One adjective that conveys a sense of how cold it is when the father gets up early on winter mornings to build the fires is blueblack. Hayden invents this word by hybridizing or putting together the words blue and black. Turning blue is a phrase we associate with being cold. We can imagine the father getting out from under the comfortable covers and facing the bitter climate with his lips and body feeling as if they are turning blue in the shivering, freezing cold as he gets into his clothes.

Black is a color that conjures up how dark those mornings are. The sun will come up shortly to spread its warming rays across the frozen landscape, but right now, the father has to get dressed without that comfort. In the one word blueblack, Hayden conveys how brutally icy the weather is and how hard it must be to get out of bed to face it in the dark.

The brutal cold is used as a contrast to the love that the father shows in getting out of bed to light the fire and spread warmth to his family. The father is illustrating a depth of love the speaker never understood as a child, doing so through such gestures as sacrificing his own comfort so that his son can get out of bed in a warm room.