It’s been nearly five years since I experienced a proper autumn, a change in weather that requires I abandon the flip-flop and actually spend precious moments of my day pulling on socks and tying water-resistant footwear. I’ve never been a big fan of cold weather, which is one of the reasons I found it really easy to ignore the fake boobage and abundant superficiality of LA where I wore socks approximately four days out of the four years I lived there. It was also really easy in LA for Jon and I to avoid the Battle of the Blanket, a war we occasionally wage against each other in defense of our respective, wildly different body temperatures.
It’s been snowing virtually non-stop here in SLC for the last five days, and while I understand that going outside requires over 20 minutes of preparation and so many layers of clothing that the body is rendered visibly sexless, I don’t understand why the temperature inside the house needs to be so high that the snow on the neighbor’s roof across the street melts from the resulting radiation.
My husband is a tall, skinny man who at any given moment is so cold that he could freeze water simply by pointing in its general direction. His usual in-house wardrobe consists of thick wool socks, at least two layers of shirts, and Carhartt 12-oz. Duck Logger Pants, a scientifically engineered piece of leg wear that can repel bullets and preserve the human body for a good 25,000 years. At night he likes to sleep in a warm room, and by warm room I mean a room so intensely hot that there are nights when I wake up suddenly and fear that I have finally gone to hell, my eyebrows singed, the skin on my arms sizzling, a fiery punishment for all my sins which most recently include dressing up my male dog as a fairy princess for Halloween.
I am similar to my husband in height and slenderness, but I was born into a long line of angry Southern women whose purpose on this earth is to crush the unsuspecting weak with our Southern angriness, and this requires a lot of energy. My Granny Hamilton was the angriest woman alive, and in winter the snow in Kentucky would stop in a circle at least 50 feet from her house. The women in my family like to sleep in colder rooms, and when I say colder I mean cold enough that we could probably cryogenically freeze the dog without any special equipment.
Jon will wrap himself in four separate Eskimo parkas, the sheet and two quilts and still lie in bed shivering, wondering why his wife is slowly trying to kill him. Meanwhile, I’m lying there Southern and angry, trying not to touch anything with my sweaty arms, melting the ice that has formed on the walls just by my nearness. Now that I’m carrying a Southern and angry baby Jon is just going to have to give in, because from here on out it’s two against one. Of course, if this baby is as angry as her head-butting indicates, he can look forward to never having to shovel snow in front of the house again.