Space Heaters

My lovely wife is a dichotomy.

She says that she hates cold weather yet, she refuses to turn the heat on in our house.

I have always known that she was a complex woman. She drives a 1948 pickup truck and likes to wear red union suits that have a button flap in the back.

I’m not even sure how all that works.

There’s a labyrinth of thoughts in that pretty head of her’s but the one I can’t seem to understand is her incongruity when it comes to cold.

If it gets below 50 degrees outside, she bundles up like Yukon Cornelius heading out across the Arctic wasteland in search of his life-sustaining supplies of cornmeal, gunpowder, ham hocks and guitar strings.

But as soon as she comes inside, down goes the thermostat until I can see my breath in front of my face.

“Why is it so cold in here,” I asked her, as I walked through the living room this week, teeth chattering.

“I like it cold inside. Put on some clothes.”

“I have on clothes.”

“Put on more.”

She said that last part like a nun standing over my desk with a ruler, ready to smack me if I disobeyed.

As I walked down the hall towards our closet to get my parka, I passed the thermostat.

“Don’t touch that!” she barked.

The woman has eyes in the back of her head.

So, I sat in the living room, shivering under three blankets and a heating pad and I pondered what it was about women and cold.

Every woman I know seems to have an internal body temperature that is regulated by a thermostat that seems to get stuck at one extreme or another.

For example, women can stand the heat much better than us men. Just come inside from that job reshingling and she will be the standing at the door demanding to know why you’re taking a break.

“Are you finished?”

“No baby, but I need to take a break for a minute. It’s really hot up there.”

“Hot? Hot?,” she will say between gritted teeth. “You know, it was hot when I was giving birth to your three sorry, good-for-nothing children but I did it, didn’t I?

“Well…”

“Yeah, I did.. now get back up there.”

And I promise you that if we’re to go into any office in these United States of America during the month of July, every single woman would have a space heater under her desk running on high.

“It gets a little chilly in here.”

They’re hot when they’re supposed to be cold, and cold when they’re supposed to be hot.

It vexes me.

I don’t understand women and especially don’t understand this.

But regardless of my lack of knowledge in regards to the females of our species, shouldn’t I have the right to be warm?

I mean, I’m a grown up now. It’s not like I’m that little kid back in 1968, freezing through every winter because I wasn’t allowed to touch the thermostat.

I don’t know what it was like around your house growing up, but us kids were strictly prohibited from adjusting the thermostat.

Our house did not have central air conditioning- that was not added until I was in high school- but we did have central heat.

I guess we did but I don’t ever recall us ever using it.

My dad taped a note on the little round thermostat in the hallway that simply read, ‘Do Not Touch.’

My father was a big man. He didn’t get angry very often but touching the thermostat was one of the few things that would make him livid.

So, instead of actually using our heat during the winter, his strategy was to place several small space heaters in strategic locations throughout the house.

When it got really cold, we would all just huddle around them like a pride of lions around a downed impala.

Yeah, we practically lived like Neanderthals.

One thing I remember the most about those winters of my childhood was getting ready for school.

The school bus came by our house real early, when it was still dark outside. So on wintry mornings my sweet mother would get up and lay our clothes out in front of the space heater.

She did NOT touch the thermostat.

After jumping out of bed, we kids would race across the cold floor to the living room and fight with each other for who would get the best spot in front of that heater.

With our bare buttocks almost touching the red hot grate, we’d pull on our pants and sweaters as fast as we could.

I can still remember how toasty those clothes felt after sitting in front of the space heater for an hour.

Back then, I thought that being huddled up together in front of that little heater with with my brother and sister meant that we were poor. But now, after all these years, I realize we weren’t.

We had each other. And a lot of people in this world don’t have anybody.

That was a long time ago and those days of austerity are over. We can afford to run the heat. We just don’t.

My mother is 86 years old now. When I go over to her house, she still has a little space heater sitting at the foot of her recliner and, you guessed it, the heat isn’t running.

She also has a space heater in her bathroom and beside her bed.

I asked her about it the other day.

“Mom, why don’t you run your heat?”

She just laughed.

“Oh, that’s a waste of money. I’m just fine with my little space heater.”

I didn’t try to convince her otherwise because she has been a space heater woman for over 60 years and it’s worked out for her so far.

Maybe my wife has the same mindset. Why waste money running the heat when we have a big stack of blankets sitting right over there?

Maybe she’s observed the world and realized that we are headed towards a climate catastrophe and she just wants to do her part. Maybe, if she turns the thermostat down to 60, it will close that pesky hole in the Ozone Layer. Bring back Wooly Mammoths. Perhaps she thinks she can single handedly keep a glacier from melting.

Maybe she’s right.

Maybe if we cut back on our CO2 emissions this winter, it will be enough to prevent polar bears from going extinct.

We’re saving the planet and just think. One day, we’ll look back with found memories and say:

“Remember that winter when Jeff froze to death?”