Cold, Sleepless Nights and Meandering Thoughts

Decades ago I read a poem that described the cold as the kind that makes your foot steps on snow squeak like Cracker Jack. If I had known how many times over the years I’d think about that metaphor I would have done my best to remember the poem’s name and its author. It’s squeaky cold here in Michigan right now. The single digit temperatures on Thursday fell to thirteen below overnight which tied the record for our lowest temperature. The wind chill was thirty below.  By Friday at 9:00 AM it had warmed up to two below and they closed the schools. It was supposed to climb to nine by noon but still, that was cold enough to make me bow out of going to my Movie and Lunch Club. I suppose if the movie picked had been more compelling than Kevin Costner’s Black and White and the restaurant something other than Mediterranean cuisine I might have braved the cold, but I was happy to forgo them both to sit in my warm La-Z-Boy knitting on my latest baby sweater. 

We have such great materials, now, for outerwear to keep us warmer than when I was a kid. Six or seven years ago I got so tired of being cold I lost my head and bought a knee length parka from L.L. Bean that is rated for 45 below zero weather. It’s made of Gore-Tex and goose down and it has one of the fo-fur trimmed, insulated hoods that looks like a periscope on a submarine. And it’s so heavy that I’d have to take up body-building just to wear it. It’s totally impractical for my current lifestyle so it hangs in the closet, but I keep it in case I ever find myself living out of a shopping cart. Old fears die hard and come, in part, from living years with a preexisting, Mickey Mouse condition that made health insurance ungodly expensive.

When I was a kid I remember going to the doctor’s office with my mom and at the end of the visit the doctor picked up her coat to help her put it on and he said, “No wonder you’re tired! I would be too if I wore this coat around!” Mind you this was over six decades ago so wearing a full length seal skin coat back then didn’t have the same animal rights implications as it would now. Still, it was a beautiful, a-line coat that could be worn over the kind of dresses the required petticoats under neat. When she wore it, I used to love leaning against her when we’d ride the city bus. It was so soothing to pet. I had that coat up until I had to downsize it out of my life after Don’s stroke in May of 2000. Strokes suck. They make you do a lot things large and small that leaves you sad and angry before acceptance settles in, much like what happens in a widow’s world. But that was then and this is now, and now when I sit and knit the memories have plenty of time to meander through my mind.

Last night I went to sleep at midnight and woke by four because I had to pee but I was so warm in my little nest of blankets and pillows that I put it off as long as I could and in the process I woke myself thoroughly up so that I couldn’t fall back to sleep. As I lay there I couldn’t help thinking about how cold and depressing it would be to be living on the streets. I don’t understand how people can endure the physical hardships of living outside in an urban jungle of picking through dumpsters, sleeping over steam grids and depending on the missions for a hot cup of coffee and a sandwich. From what I’ve read the vast majority of the nearly 800 homeless people in my town are mentally ill and/or alcoholics and/or veterans. 

Then there are the ‘tent cities’ that are comprised of a different class of homeless people, refugees from a bad economy or bad choices or a combination of the two. Throw in a few catastrophic health issues that drain all of a person’s assets and keeps them out of the workforce it’s easy to see the homeless world is full of hard luck stories. Stories that few of us sitting in our nice, warm houses want to hear. We could never be like them, we tell ourselves because it makes us feel better to believe that. Hanging around the stroke support communities like I did when Don was alive, I know better now. It can happen to ordinary people, people who thought they had planned well for the future. You might say that I occasionally suffer from a kind of guilt accumulated from living a relatively charmed life with no obstacles I couldn’t overcome or come to accept. And the phrase, “By the grace of God it could be you or me” is never far from my thoughts on cold, sleepless nights. ©

I still have to sew on the buttons on and press it, but here's my latest baby sweater.