Winter

Right now, with winter settling in, the nights freezing more often than not, it seems impossible to remember how it ever felt to be too warm.  I know there were nights in the summers where I lay on a nearly bare mattress, kicking fitfully at the flat sheet around my ankles, trying to decide if I could bear to have that weight on my sweat-clammy skin, or if I could bear to sleep without any covering.  (the ghouls get you if you don’t sleep under a sheet!)

But now, it’s winter, and that means my bed starts becoming … tricky.  Laundry day is a CHORE.  My bed has more layers than some cakes.  The heavy, quilted mattress pad.  The fitted sheet.  The flat sheet.  The super soft microfiber comforter (from Society6, which I love love love).  The quilted bedspread.  The microfleece blanket.  The final cover sheet. (Because of the dogs.  When I had large dogs, they didn’t sleep on the bed.  But then I got a schnauzer-dachshund mix who claimed the bed as her right, and taught the subsequent mini-schnauzer, who in turn taught the puppy.  Easier to just put on a cover sheet than worry about dirt and fur.)

Removing any of these layers tends to send me scrambling, shivering, for a cover in the middle of the night.

It’s four loads of laundry. It’s endless treks up and down the stairs. It’s another reason I contemplate moving to sunnier, warmer climes every December.   It’s hard to remember that when I was a kid in Miami, snow and cold seemed… magical. From Narnia’s endless winter, to all the Christmas songs, to the fashionable accoutrements–boots and nifty jackets and big chunky cable knit sweaters.  The closest thing we got to snow in Miami was the rich girl’s birthday party, where her parents bought snow and covered their front yard with it.  Or the iceberg in the NOAA museum.  Or that one weirdly magical day where teeny tiny flakes swirled out from the sky for a whole five minutes, and we all shivered and went inside for hot cocoa.

I spent so much of my childhood dreaming of snow, and now, I spend winter nights under my layers and layers of blankets, socks on my feet, dreaming of sand and sun.

I could say it’s human nature to be discontent with the status quo, but I think it’s simpler than that.  I’m stuck in my own fairy tale: The Girl Who Couldn’t Thermo-Regulate.