Saturday, October 16, 2004
Those Cold October Nights
Its the middle of Ocotober. Its cold. And its snowing.
It will get much colder. By December, or at the latest January, we will have had at least a day or two below -30. But it never seems to hurt as much then as it does now, these first few days in October, when the cold comes for new.
By December you will have given up and accepted the inevitable winter. But now, in October, you still cling to summer, and that makes it all the more painful. You try to go out in the morning and grab your coffee in your light fleece jacket, but you find yourself shivering within minutes, and then running back to the house to put on another layer. You wake up every morning an icesicle in your bed until you succumb to flannel sheets and another blanket. Finally, you scrounge through your closet to find that pair of mitts and touque that you tossed away a few months ago, not bothering to pay attention to where you threw it, somehow believing that this summer would be different and you would never need it again.
I have my space heater out again. Its beside me right now while I write this, humming away and warming up my toes. I wish I had a fireplace. That would be ideal. The space heater is the poor man's fireplace, maybe the renters fireplace, but it has its advantages and you can take it with you wherever you go.
And this morning, for the first time, I put my clothes in the dryer before I put them on. just to warm them up. Pretty soon this will become a ritual and it will cause me to show up at work a few minutes later every day then I did during the summer.
Yeah, winter is coming. We may get a few more nice days, or a chinook at some point. But its just an illusion. The reality is that now its all downhill.
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