the winter of my discontent

I have lived in this house since 2001. Seven years. Seven long years without air-condition or heat in my bedroom. I have silently suffered freezing winters beneath multiple layers of down, wool, and fleece blankets, and seven blistering Julys with a small desk-fan to relieve the sultry Maryland summer.

My house is not old—no more than 12 years old—and it has central air. Every room in the house has central air conditioning and heat. Every room except mine. It is miserable.
Summer is not so bad. My room faces the back of the house, and I rarely have direct sunlight. Combined with the constant breeze that flows through the valley below my house, I am comfortable during the summer.

Winter, on the other hand, is miserable. If I am in my bedroom during the cold season (I call it that because winter is not always cold here, as we have already discovered in a previous blog post) I am under a blanket.

The worst part is the draft. My bedroom (the one I picked out of the four possibilities on moving day) is directly under the attic. The attic is pretty open, and wind gets in easy. On particularly windy nights, the plywood that sits over the entrance to the attic will shift in the wind. I also get drafts through my window. I am not sure how. I spent my morning draping a heavy blanket over the window to keep some of the draft out and the heat in. I then stood on my bed with my hand right below the vent in my ceiling (the one that is supposed to deliver the heat) and noticed a slight cool draft coming from there as well. Makes no sense. The rest of the house is toasty, and I have a cold draft.

At least I don’t have to worry about my Macbook overheating. I’ll never die of heat exhaustion. I will be able to survive if the world runs out of heat.

Those are all of the situational pros I can think of. Right now, my cold fingers can only think of cons.

Getting out of the shower is the worst. My bathroom has the best heat in the house. (funny how a house has different heating scenarios in each room, despite the “central” air conditioning.) The bathroom is always perfectly toasty in the winter and refreshingly cool in the summer.

Getting out of a hot shower and walking into a freezing bedroom is unbearable. This morning, the doorknob was even cold to the touch. The way the metal of a seatbelt is when you first get in on a snowy day.

Nothing beats the terrible feeling of being cold and getting under a comforter that is still cold. The minutes of waiting for your body temperature to catch on and kindle the heat trapping properties of said comforter could feel like hours. But once the heat is trapped in, life is good.

Until you have to move your leg and it happens to reach just beyond the warm area and into the uncharted cold desert that is the uninhabited sheets outside of the body-heat zone. Perhaps the leg of your pajama pants becomes stuck around your knee, leaving your whole leg exposed. You might kick and swing your leg in attempt to pull the pant leg back down. A shiver runs from that foot to the very tip of your nose, and you gather the blankets closer to you, tucking them beneath your body to keep the cold out. For that minute, you are an Eskimo, or a biologist studying the snow in Antarctica. The world outside of your comforter is frozen tundra home for all sorts of misery and suffering.

My bedroom is the North Pole.