On A Cold Night

This is the first day of winter. We have already been through a rather intense cold snap here, though we didn’t get the snow that our friends on the Eastern seaboard got last weekend.

My post yesterday invoked a memory of when I was a kid. I’d go to bed with my battery powered transistor radio and an ear phone, and I would snuggle under the covers. I recall the cold nights East coast winter nights and how cool it would be in my bedroom.

The house I grew up in was built in 1865. It was of the Federalist style. There was a lot of attention paid to elements of design and structure, however little attention was paid to insulation. We at least had storm windows and an attic that kept some of the heat contained, but there were breezy evenings where if you had a candle lit for atmosphere, it could have easily been blown out if it were in the right location.

Bed was a refuge on a cold night. It would be cold getting into bed, but even as a youngster it wouldn’t be long before my body heat could warm the bed to a tolerable level. My mother told ne stories of how her father would put a brick by the flame and then wrap it in a towel to put it at the foot or her bed under her covers to warm her toes. She was the skinny blond haired Irish lass; the apple of his eye.

We had baseboard heat. There was no open flame and I never got the warm brick treatment. I was on my own to generate my own bed heat. I didn’t mind, but just hearing the stories of a father’s love for his daughter always made me wish I had a daughter so I could warm her toes on a cold winter night.

I don’t burn the fireplace very often, so I suppose these days if I had a little daughter I’d take one of those bags of flax seed my wife sewed up years ago and pop it into the microwave for two minutes and we would have an instant bed warmer, but somehow that isn’t nearly as romantic as a hearth heated brick wrapped in a soft towel.