Skip to main content

Floor vent

The snow has started to fall.




Not here exactly, but still, the cold wet rain that is the remorseless usher of snowfall certainly has.
As I steel myself against the cold rain, I always start plotting how to get warmer boots and more waterproof clothing at this time of year.   I fantasize about being toasty as an element inside me starts to calibrate to the falling temperature.


We work hard to heat up the molecules in the room in which we sit and play.
How will we keep the molecules warm this week, this month, this season?




I get there soaking wet--a chilly cold has set in that is hard to warm up from, but my friend has a floor vent, and that changes everything. The heat rushes up to meet me.  I quickly take off my socks and stretch them across the grate eagerly anticipating their dryness against my skin. I stood over that grate, just for a moment, to fully experience the blast of heat.






I turned my attention to my friends, and over the next hour, I almost forgot that heating grate, I almost took for granted how ready that heat was compared to how vanquished it was just metres from where I sat on the other side of that wall. But the wine, and the grate and the company cast a spell and my mind did not wander to how to get warmer boots even once.






But as, I went back outside and returned to our house to heat up the molecules again, the memory of being warmed, warmed me through.






Those snowflakes and rain drops fall fast down towards the boiling red lit from within structures that we build against them. Little do they know how fragile those structures are under their weight.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Small Craft

I accompanied my mother-in-law to an appointment this week. On the paper, preparing her for the appointment, it invited her bring along something to read or a small craft. As soon as I heard about this invitation to bring a small craft into an otherwise austere waiting area, my mind started to do bouncing somersaults in many different directions. Googly eyes? Glue gun? Feathers? Play clay? Friendship braclets?

Bringing her back

 As the first anniversary finally passed, I exhaled.  The sadness still nibbled away at the edges, but not clawing deep into my chest like it had been with varying degrees of ferocity in the twelve months previously.  She died in early summer, so I plunged into ocean and lakes and ate fruit straight from the plant.  The grief became softer, the folk songs carried me along in the potato patch we planted in therapy. But then, I started to miss her.  The deep grief kept her so close and now as the pressure eased, so did her presence.  I held my breath and decided to be really sad this morning just to see her face.  To sit in her prescence.  My breath became jagged as I cried for her, for us.   This Taylor Swift cover  by Marc Maron broke me right open this morning.  Here's to staying broken open enough to keep your loved ones close. And then, I walked into her garden. The garden she envisionied, planted over and over and still pre...

The words coming out of my mouth

  These days I wear a mask. I don't wear a mask all of the time, only when I am indoors or unavoidably up close with people who I don't usually interact with.  I wear one when I am ordering things, or buying things or attempting to enjoy some form of public entertainment.  I cannot rely on reading others lips. My lips are hidden. We ask each other to repeat.  We move our eyes or our whole heads to try and enunciate more clearly.  I say fewer words, more carefully chosen words behind the mask. Sometimes that is helpful, sometimes that just causes more confusion. I walked into the woods. I did not need a mask.  I only saw a few other people and they were distanced. Masks were unnecessary. After so much talking and not talking and avoiding talking out loud I am forced to examine when I speak and when I choose not to. This is not a bad thing since I can be an insufferable chatter box, just a new thing for my brain to adjust itself to. When I am not standing aro...