WE'RE ALL QUITE CHILLY HERE, THANK YOU

I used to terribly dislike being cold, and also cold weather and cold places – being unbearably warm was inevitably preferable.  But this has been changing.

I climbed into bed last night and lay shaking between the sheets, imploring Mark to come join me.  Cold nights are better with two.  Strangely, we learned this best during the first summer we were married, while working in the mountains, where a night in July will have you crowding around a fire if you’re sleeping outside, although we weren’t.  My great-uncle promised to come get the heater working in our camper, “but your best heater is this” – and he pulled me close to Mark.  The most effective way for my husband to get me out of bed on those frosty mountain mornings was to get up himself and watch my resolve crumble without anyone helping generate heat beneath the blankets.

The summer that has finally ended was too long.  The first day that warranted a sweatshirt was glorious to begin with, but I had discarded it by midmorning.  On nights when the air itself was a fleece blanket, I longed to be cold.  I was positively aching to wear long pants, to zip up my jacket when I drove Mark to work in the mornings.

We’re past the Ides of October now and our heat still isn’t on, partly because we don’t have our act together and partly because I’m reveling in wearing long socks and Mark’s sweaters every day.  Yesterday I wore a hat to run some errands because my hair was still wet from showering and the feeling was utter joy, a tangible throwback to college when I would routinely squash wet hair under a hat for the first class of the morning.

I’ve been running my showers as hot as they’ll go and staying in for as long as the grown-up faction of my brain (the part that sees the monthly water bills) will allow me.  My towel is better than standing wet behind the curtain shivering, but as soon as I’ve pushed said curtain back to retrieve it, the residual warmth that has been trapped back there will swarm out into the room.  I play these games with myself, but I enjoy them far more than the long months when I ran the water as cold as I could stand and was still in a hurry to get out of the cloying humidity of the bathroom into an only slightly less sauna-like bedroom, where at least the water would evaporate off of me.

So I’m enjoying the sensation of being cold, enjoying putting the kettle on to boil every day for a mug of hot water that makes everything better.  One morning Libby was very compactly curled up into the couch, so Mark threw a blanket over her before we left.  When I returned from dropping him at work, there was no tapping of dog-feet across the kitchen to meet me, to investigate my identity, to look expectantly at me and to make sure that I was really going to stay around, perhaps to eat something that she could plead to partake in.  Not that day.  Libby was still snuggled into the blanket, looking expectantly and waggling her ears at me while I laughed at her – but never budging from the comfort of her nest.

We’re all quite delightfully chilly here, thank you very much.