Today was the first day of the season cold enough to wear a sweater. In fact, as I lay on the couch reading the paper just a short time ago I had to get up for a wool blanket to keep from shivering. The girls are wearing sleeper pajamas with feet.
Being cold always makes me think of the bathroom in my parents' house, on the second floor, where the heating vent was on a vertical panel by the door at the base of a shelf to the ceiling on which towels and bedsheets were stored.
As my mother's strategy for keeping heating costs down in our drafty old house could be summed up by the words, "Put on your parka," we found unorthodox ways to keep warm. Or at least I did, and I was the one who always seemed to be cold: like Midnight, our cat, I sought out all the heating vents in the house and would lie on them, or by them, with Midnight, waiting for the periodic blasts of heat to warm me while I read.
But the bathroom heating vent--that was my vent of choice. For one, the bathroom door was the only one in the house with a lock. I could go in and close and lock the door, sit with my back against the wall, knees bent up--as the space was small--the soles of my feet against the vent. It would get too hot, and I would have to pull them an inch or so away, but for as long as I could I would let the heat waft around my legs, never quite reaching my face, leaving most of my body warmed, the way it feels to lie under layers of down with the windows open in the middle of winter, the burnish of cold on the cheeks serving only to enhance the cocoon effect of the bedding.
Right now, as I sit and write, my feet and lower legs are cold. I have wrapped my legs around each other for warmth, but what I would really like is about fifteen minutes in that bathroom, with the door locked, my chemistry book on my lap, a Seventeen magazine on top of it, my feet flat up against the blast of heat from the vent.
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My bedroom had a lousy heating vent, so I parked myself (yes, book in hand) in front of the kitchen vent, the back hall vent, the living room vent, or if she wasn't home and best of all, the heating duct behind my sister's bedroom door. Our parents would yell: "Where are your slippers?" and "Put your sweater on!"...but you couldn't feel the heat of the vent through slippers now, could you? When the heat went off...the thermostat registering that the temp was where it should be, we'd sneak downstairs and inch it up...just enough to get the warm air blasting again.
Our house now has cast iron baseboard heating with no vents. However, the kitchen radiator is bigger and flat against the wall. Even at 50 years old, on the coldest of days, I sometimes lean against it until my back burns. But the best replacement I have found for those wonderful warming heating vents, is a hot water bottle with boiled water wrapped in a towel placed strategically under my feet. You should get one.
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