My house is quiet, my sons are asleep. It is so quiet, I can hear my cats purring from across the room. The heater clicks on and I realize it must be quite cold outside, because it is set on 68. My feet don’t like the cold; I don’t like my feet cold. My feet are Florida feet, designed to inhabit warm climes and wear sandals. Winter is a perfect lesson in the relativity of things. While someone buried in frozen tundra, who has to dig out or dig into their home will scoff at my lamentations about winter. But for a girl who did not own a winter coat until the winter of 1984 despite a birth year of 1966, winter is frost and closed in shoes. Our stores don’t even carry proper winter weather clothes. If I wanted to venture north, I best do it in the part of the year snowbirds call fall or early spring. I would flash freeze just getting out of a car to walk into a home. I managed undergraduate college in Washington, DC but I was enthralled by snow then. It was magical. Besides, snow doesn’t stick long in DC.
I am happy to evade snow. Christmas morning with house windows open and the sounds of the neighbor kids hooting about their gifts is perfectly normal.
The Christmas tree will go up today. I did some of the outdoor decorations yesterday. It is beginning to feel a bit like Christmas.