The way other people hate food poisoning or a bad case of the flu, I hate being cold.

I can’t function cold, at all, and by cold I mean any temperature that dips below fifty degrees. My teeth chatter, my lips turn blue and my toes go numb. All I want to do is wrap myself in a wool blanket, huddle in front of a roaring fire and eat large amounts of high-fat carbohydrates. My husband sleeps in shorts and a T-shirt under a cotton bedspread we brought home from Guatemala; beside him, I sleep in flannel pajamas and a fleece sweatshirt under a layer of comforters so thick he calls it the “iron lung.”

Cold is the reason I moved to California, so that I wouldn’t have to be. Like Scarlett O’Hara raising her fist to defy hunger at the end of the first reel of Gone With the Wind, I vowed, growing up in a one-hundred year old house in New Jersey that lacked insulation, that as soon as I had a choice, I would never be cold again.

In that house, the water in the toilet bowls froze at least once every winter. We shivered in the kitchen with the oven door open and all four burners on the stovetop aflame. At night, we draped our school uniforms over the steam heaters so that in the morning we could jump straight into them from the warmth of our beds; once I sat so close to the coils of an old-fashioned space heater I singed a mohair sweater. The year that Jimmy Carter urged all Americans to turn down their thermostats to sixty-five degrees, we were incredulous. Sixty-five degrees was balmy.

What was he talking about?

I lived blissfully in San Diego until I met and fell in love with my husband. I rented and he owned, in the frozen tundra of Marin. What choice did I have but to move?

He thinks I’m kidding when I tell him: The day I see a snowflake, I’m heading south.

By Jessica O’Dwyer

Labels: cold, Jessica O'Dwyer, Marin County, New Jersey, San Diego

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