Freezing

I’ve heard it said that freezing to death is not actually a bad way to die.  Well, I think I’ve been slowly freezing to death every winter for the past ten years, and it’s not a pleasant way to die either.  I wonder how anyone came to that conclusion, since nobody who’s been through the whole process is really in a condition to speak about it.  I think it’s maybe just supposed to be the late stages of it that aren’t bad, and maybe I haven’t been that far, but it still seems to me that if it’s bad for a while it doesn’t really matter if it’s not that bad right at the end.

Anyway, my opinion surely counts as much as anyone’s.  I’ve been through part of it, after all, repeatedly.  It is as if every September I begin getting colder and colder until March when I slowly start to get warm.  It’s usually August before I feel completely warmed, and then of course the cycle starts again.  This place, this cold, will be the death of me.

Sometimes I wish I had never gotten married and moved to this god-forsaken state.  My husband spoke highly of it, talking about the beauty of the Michigan summer and all the winter sports we could partake in after the snow fell.  I thought I understood cold so I was fairly optimistic about the idea; we moved up in May when the flowers were blooming and I was so happy.  I hadn’t started that summer chilled so I had a few truly pleasant months; I should have known better when we went camping up north in July and got sleet, but I thought it was a fluke.

Then September hit and it seemed like the weather was fooling with us.  Some days would be freezing and others would be roasting.  October was crisp and cool, with maybe a bit too much rain on Halloween but mostly blue skies with brilliant leaves against them.  Then there was November; even before the snow hit I started freezing to death.  By the first of December we had six inches, and I discovered that skiing wasn’t as fun as I had been lead to believe because even when you start sweating inside your snowsuit your toes hurt and your face is numb enough to make talking difficult.

We had warmer days but never warm enough.  We kept the thermostat at 75 during the day because I sat in a completely invalid hump over the heating vent when it was any lower.  At night we put it down to 65, and I piled under what seemed like a million blankets and tucked my feet up to conserve heat.  In January we had a thaw but I was just starting to come out of my shivering stupor when we got hit with more snow that didn’t leave until mid-March.  On the first day of spring it went to 33 in the daytime, which seemed like an achievement, but it dropped to 15 at night.

This winter our heat went out.  They tell us it’ll be a week before it’s fixed.  I’ve been sitting huddled in front of an electric space heater with a blanket and a hot cup of tea for two days.  I’m both hoping and dreading that pretty soon I’ll start feeling warm: dreading because they say that’s one of the advanced stages of freezing to death, and hoping because it might be worth it.