Cold

Shivering, hunched down into scant layers that aren’t getting the job done, it occurs to me that it’s been over a year since I’ve been cold. Not chilled-so-I-think-I’ll-get-a-sweatshirt-from-the-closet cold, but teeth-rattling, bone-aching, finger-numbing cold. First-run-in-the-morning cold. Beneath the discomfort, the sensation is glorious.

 

As Mary and I each have some years under our belts and skeletons in our medical closet that could make infection life-threatening, we’ve isolated ourselves quite drastically this past year-and-a-half, our world shrunk to the twenty wooded acres surrounding the house with an every-other-week run to the grocery (arriving, of course, at 6:00am as the doors are opened, in hopes of empty aisles). We’ve ZOOMed with our neighbors for social interaction. We’ve withdrawn. You may think us foolish, but so be it. 

 

That bubble, the place into which we’d taken shelter, has been climate-controlled; the thermostat sliding between 70 and 76, depending on the season. Those early-morning grocery runs preceded by remotely started truck-warming. Walks in the woods taken appropriately dressed or deferred during extremes. Our thermal conditions have been as regulated as our human interactions. We’ve remained comfortable in uncomfortable times.

 

But comfort has costs, inertia the worst of them. Despite vaccination, our return to the world has been slow. It’s been too easy to hold on to the routine, well-established during this past pandemic, and to look for reasons to maintain it. We’ve lived, and lived well, but in the comfort zone of reduced scale and scope; the temperature, consistent and even.

 

So now, as I skip across this lake, five states away from my bubble, as I huddle deep into my Gore-Tex for the first time in too long, I remember how much it can hurt. How cold can coalesce into a single, sharp point of focus, driving deep into your being and obliterating everything else with a numbing pain.

 

Pain that means I’m alive again.