It’s cold outside tonight. I’m reminded of this sullen fact every time the thermostat goes “click” and a blast of cool air rushes forth from the vents in the floor. Damned heat pumps and their complete lack of “clutch” – right when you need them the most, they don’t work for shit.
I hate the cold. Times like these, I imagine myself living on some island in the middle of the Mediterranean, where it’s always right around 25 Celsius (because they don’t “do” Fahrenheit over there like us backward Americans do) and the sun shines lazily on the soft green water, and life is like one of those resort commercials you see for places in the Caribbean, except it’s much too hot down there. No, I’d much rather live someplace mild and temperate, not quite on the Equator, but just close enough where winter is something that happens somewhere else, something you go visit on vacation when you want to go snowboarding. Of course, I can’t snowboard, but maybe if I lived somewhere warm, I’d like to take a vacation and learn.
Finally, the air coming from the vents is warm. The backup heater must have kicked on – the electric one, the one that makes my electric bill jump a million dollars every time it wakes from its dusty slumber, laughing at me with its dusty little laugh. It knows, just as I do, how I’ll grumble and complain about it when the bill comes, and I’ll wish spring would hurry up and get here before I go broke paying off the power company. Every spring I swear I’ll get a propane furnace put in, so next year I can laugh at that worthless heat pump and that smug little electric heater, but every winter that smug little heater laughs at me instead.
Tonight, though, I’ve had enough of all of it, and of all the other troubles pestering me from the back of my mind, the heart doctor telling me I’m supposed to quit this and quit that and stop eating this and stop drinking that, my car complaining about how it needs new spark plugs and an oil change and all that other stuff and that it’s gonna just not start for me one morning if I don’t do something about it soon, and all the other little worries dancing around the me-pole singing their little songs of trouble. I’ve had enough.
It’s time to find that quiet, happy place, where I can’t hear all those little troubles sing their songs of worry. It’s such a silly little ritual, sprinkling the fairy dust and putting on the noisy pants and the fuzzy suit and curling up with a friend under a mountain of quilts and blankets tall enough to hide us both. But for just a little while, under that mountain, I can remember, and I can forget.