Stand Off

If there is a heaven and if I get there, all I ask is that my animals be with me and it be warm.

It's late December and I'm a vertitable fashion statement of winter wear. Two pairs of socks,

longjohns and jeans, a flannel shirt over a heavy sweatshirt over a North Country insulated top,

a muffler wound 'round my neck and a knit cap. The thermostat is at 75, the space heater is purring steadily and I'm still cold. Not freezing cold, mind you, not even really uncomfortably cold, just somewhere down deep and fundamentally cold. My mind and body need the heat and humidity of a southern summer like an addict needs a fix. Where's a decent hot flash when you need one, I think bitterly.

I come by it honestly enough. Despite my daddy's Nova Scotian/New England roots, after about September, he was always cold. I can still see him layered up in thermals and bulky sweaters with a blanket tucked around him and sitting close to the fire. He slept in flannel pajamas over thermals and wore a snug wool hat pulled down over his ears. It took all he had to leave the house on those bitter cold winter mornings seven days a week and he quietly worried all winter long - although it never happened - that the furnace would go dry before the next oil delivery.

My mother, on the other hand, thrived on lowering the heat and repeatedly telling us both that it wasn't that cold, it was our imagination. We were being melodramatic, she liked to say, making a federal case of it, not really suffering. The house was barely 6o degrees in the dead of winter but she wasn't cold and that settled that.

“Grow up, for Christ's sake,” she sneered, “Stop being such babies!”

Over the years, the cold became a sort of symbol for all that was wrong in the family, all that was irreconcilable and angry and finally estranged. Cold vs hot became a metaphor for every raging argument and every act of verbal violence. There was to be no peacemaking. My mother won the battles for years only because of the misery we knew she would inflict on us if she lost. The cold overwhelmed and then buried us.

“Not no more,” I tell the thermostat and ease it to 78.

After a few hours of sunshine, when it warms up enough to be tolerable. I cautiously shed a layer, turn down the heat a few degrees and lower the temperature on the space heater then reverse it all shortly after the sun goes down. In between times, I trek to the home improvement store to puchase a new space heater for the office and stop at the grocery store to stock up on soup and hot chocolate. As weapons go, they may not be much but every bit of resistance I can muster helps. The cold is a determined enemy and I have no intention of fighting fair.  I won't settle for a stand off.