Mittens & Mufflers

Snow is such a rare event - praise Jesus! - in my part of the country, that just the threat of it is enough to unravel us.  The probability of it sends us scurrying for mittens, mufflers and cover.  An actual dusting is downright paralyzing and a flurry might as well be a blizzard.  For someone who lived in New England for as long as I did, all this fuss seems overdone and useless - a tiny molehill made into an entire mountain range - but when the flakes begin to fall, I still stare like an open mouthed tourist.  I suppose it calls up childhood memories of snowmen, snow angels, snow days, snow shoveling.  These are not treasured memories but more the stuff of nightmares - frostbitten-feeling toes, slush in my boots, fingers frozen and numb - oh, the first snowfall is pretty enough, I'll give you that, especially on a blue-ish moonlit night when you're watching from a snug second story bedroom window with a cup of hot chocolate at your side and Christmas carols playing in the background.  You don't think about what it will be like in the morning and for many mornings after.

If there's a constant in my life - aside from the anger on which so much of me is built - I suppose it's being cold.  They go together somehow.

The house I grew up in was cold but my tiny room had a good sized heating vent - at night in winter I would open it up as far as it would go and the heat would roar in - by morning, it was so hot and stuffy that I had to open a window.

My grandmother's house was cold - sterile, obsessively neat - and my room at the top of the stairs was monstrous large and sparsely furnished.  I piled on blankets and quilts and slept in thermals.

There was the nasty little two room apartment on Gainsborough Street in downtown Boston where the heat was controlled by the landlord's whim - rarely on before November or past March.  Then a series of other apartments, each a little nicer with a little more space but never warm.  And there were workplaces where my fingers would stiffen with cold.

A small house in Maine with snowdrifts that reached the windows.  A cabin in New Hampshire with a wood stove that was blindingly hot and stole your breath but still icy if you wandered too far from it.

And finally there is Louisiana - the best of a bad lot, I sometimes think - in the summer the heat is paralyzing but come winter when the temperature drops into the 30's and 40's, it feels like the rest of my life.  

Classrooms and restaurants and hospitals and department stores.  Subways and commuter trains and college bookstores.  Doctors offices and banks and grocery stores.  Not always intolerably cold but cold enough to be uncomfortably aware of being cold.

I feel it everywhere.  I always have.  Underneath the long underwear and the flannel shirts and the sweats I pile on until it's awkward to move, there's a draft, a chill, a shiver. 

Not all of it comes from the outside.