The Effects of Freezing

It’s officially gotten cold – very cold – and over the weekend white stuff fell out of the sky, covered the ground and basically made walking the dog feel like an experience much longer in duration than it really was. Cold has that effect on time (hence two minutes last week in the main kitchen’s walk-in freezer, jotting down available last minute hors d’oeuvre add-ons for a group equated, in my mind, to roughly two weeks tent camping on the Alaskan tundra). It slows everything down and slows it down every year but I’m never quite ready for it. It’s always a surprise when I wake up on a winter morning and find it takes me three hours to move from my pillow to the shower. Basil requires no less than a week and a half to complete one circuit around the courtyard and the elapsed time between when I get into my car and when the seat heater actually produces anything remotely resembling heat is equal to about two and a half months. Or maybe that’s just how it feels but as they say, perception is reality and my perception is that once the temperatures plummet so does the second hand’s ability to move normally around the clock face.

There’s no cure for it. I suppose you just accept it and understand any activity you have to undertake outdoors (where it’s very, very cold) when you’d rather be inside (where it’s very, very warm) is going to feel like it lasts forever. The best you can do is prepare yourself by basically changing how you dress to go outside. In my case this entails throwing on an additional pair or two of flannel pants, three to six sweaters, a heavy coat, gloves under glittens, one scarf, sometimes two hats, three pair of socks, boots, and if I can find them (because they’re never in the same place at the beginning of a new winter as I left them at the close of the old one), the teal blue ear muffs you can really only get away with in a fashion sense when you’re wearing enough layers to make the Michelin Man look alarmingly anorexic. This slathering on of clothing layers isn’t limited to just me. Basil, being the Alpha Diva she truly is, doesn’t ‘do’ cold, so winter is rough for her. She also doesn’t ‘do’ wet, as evidenced by how she will ‘heel’ not on command but only when it’s raining or snowing and to step 4” from my side would remove her from the protection of the umbrella I’m carrying, as well as by how she will twist her body into some pretty amazing contortions in order to pee on a curb, a tree, or anything else available just at the edge of the grass without actually setting a paw in the grass, as the grass is wet and as I said, she doesn’t ‘do’ wet. Hence her own pre-walk donning of a heavy blue sweater, an extra bandana, and if there’s ice melt in the courtyard (and there is, every day all winter long), the Velcro-adhered dog boots from REI, replete with ‘super grip’ traction on the bottom. Which protects her very nicely and keeps her as warm as possible, even if they do cause her to walk as if she’d just mastered the very minimal basics of it and isn’t convinced she’s got it quite right yet.

As you can imagine, we look nothing short of blatantly ridiculous when we set out for these morning and evening jaunts and there’s no way around it. Some things in life you just have to chalk up as unavoidably embarrassing and try not to think too much about them. Eventually winter will end and summer will come back and you’ll have just the opposite problem, that of wearing enough clothes because it’s much easier to walk directly to the pool in a bikini although it’s recommended that you wear a wrap of some kind because, in all honesty, one resident’s courtyard is everyone else’s courtyard and I’m quite sure my neighbors don’t want to see me in a state of undress any more than I would care to see most of them. Where ridiculous attire can’t be avoided it should be put into a positive perspective and I do this by reminding myself how many years (minutes, I know it’s only minutes but my perception was years) it took, every time it snowed, to run the snow blower and/or handle a snow shovel all the way down a steep driveway and around a corner lot, knowing it would all just pile up again before I got home from work and I’d repeat the process again in the evening when even the cold was cold from the cold, it was so cold. I remember that and I feel almost OK about things. So what if it takes four weeks to walk across the courtyard, through the back lot and to my carport. Set against the memory of pulling out of the aforementioned corner lot’s downhill-facing garage in a brand new vehicle and realizing (too late, of course) that what I’d pulled onto was a sheet of sheer, downhill-sloping ice, remembering that horrendous sounded-like-the-Jolly-Green-Giant-mauling-a-soda-can crunch when the entire front quarter panel of that brand new vehicle was brought to a stop by a brick pillar at the base of the driveway, and blanking out completely the repeat of that giant-sized crunch when Brent, emerging from the house and insisting ‘if I’d just pulled forward correctly that wouldn’t have happened’ persisted in backing the vehicle a few feet whereafter it immediately slid forward again and reconnected with the pillar, thus annihilating anything left of that aforementioned quarter panel. Surely having all your neighbors see and hear you and your spouse seemingly taking turns beating the hell out of a brand new vehicle at six-thirty in the morning is a bit more embarrassing than teal blue ear muffs. As I said, perspective is very important.

Especially considering temperatures aren’t due to go up any time soon, which pretty much guarantees I’m going to have to get up at 3:00am to allow enough time to move from my pillow to the shower and get to work on time.