The great consolation of this big freeze has been cozying near the living room fireplace, around a real fire, and giving in to children’s demands for s’mores.
The great consolation of this big freeze has been cozying near the living room fireplace, around a real fire, and giving in to children’s demands for s’mores.
‘I can’t defend it myself,” I said to my child when he complained of yet another day of low-single-digit temperatures greeting him as he went to school. “It’s indefensible.” For ten days we’ve been below freezing, and for many of them in the single digits for a good part of the night and early morning. Our heat pump is mostly holding up, but because the blower is running so much of the day, our home humidity is hovering below “morning hacking” and above “uncontrollable nosebleed.”
We live in a house that was built in the 1930s. And there are a lot of perks to having that pedigree. The old mantelpiece in the dining room is a gorgeous and unique sculpture. There is nice casing around the doors. There are walls between the rooms. Actual walls. They allow you to do something in one room, while other people do other things in another room, and you don’t bother one another. This technology has been nearly lost to time and fashion.
Airtightness is not one of those 1930s perks. We’ve tried to modernize, with blown-in insulation in the attic and around the floor joists. But after a week of subzero-Celsius weather, the floor tiles in one upstairs bathroom can put a chill into your feet for hours. For some reason the small kitchen counter is a cold sink. It’s well below 50 degrees to the touch. At this time of year, it’s a kind of open-shelf refrigerator. The forecast is for another entire week below freezing.
Of course, the thief-of-joy algorithms that run social media mean that my Instagram and YouTube are full of videos of robotic snowblowers, heated driveways, and heated-floor systems. Apparently, the upper middle class of this country will soon never put a foot where there isn’t some kind of hydronic temperature control.
We’ve loosened up a little bit on screen time. My dog can barely manage to defecate outside in this situation. Every surface either has ice-hard snow up to her shoulders or is covered in rock salt that can burn her paws. I don’t expect my son to keep up his habit of playing soccer against the walls of our house.
In their desperation for stimulation, the kids have thankfully turned to puzzles and graphic novels and encyclopedias of sports. My youngest son, just turned seven, is asking for religious education. We bought Word on Fire’s excellent children’s Bible, The Story of All Stories, and he likes all the violence of the Old Testament. Plagues of boils, David cutting off Goliath’s head. His religious imagination is set to Johnny Cash singing “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.” I can’t wait till we get to Maccabees.
In a few days in February, we officially exit even the last liturgical remnants of the holidays and enter into the hell of Winter-but-not-Christmas. The great consolation of this big freeze has been cozying near the living room fireplace, around a real fire, and giving in to children’s demands for s’mores. “This is awesome,” my youngest said, scarfing one the other night.
Meanwhile, I have to thank the Federal Reserve and Jerome Powell for keeping interest rates high, and thus forever breaking my winter addiction to looking at Sun Belt real estate listings on Zillow. The rates are too damn high, just give me another blanket.