This past Saturday, stepping out on an extreme limb of faith, I asked my husband to once again remove the ice claw from my cane; but even more brazenly, I asked him to please put my winter boots into storage, upstairs—along with my winter coat.
He did ask what I would do if it snowed again, and I told him the truth. We’re nearly all the way out of April. If it snows again, I’m staying inside the house—and I don’t even care if we’re out of coffee when I do it.
I know that last bit has my beloved concerned; after all, that’s going below the bottom line beneath which we both, usually, we will not sink. But friends, I tell you truly, a person has to draw the line at some point and take a stand.
That’s mine.
We’ve had a couple of days of magnificent, fresh-smelling air in the last couple of weeks. I took the opportunity to have my front and back doors wide open to air out the house. Also, I have my bedroom window open about an inch and a half now. I’ve always slept better in a cooler bedroom, with the window open. But I’ve noticed some changes, lately. And I believe that I’m possibly on the verge of inching toward that tipping point, the one my daughter has told me about. The one where a person steps (or maybe stumbles) over the line from middle age, right into the morass of elderly status.
My daughter, Jennifer, is what’s known here in Canada as a PSW—a Personal Support Worker. I believe, in the U.S., that career is referred to as being a Nurse’s Aid.
Now, Jennifer doesn’t tolerate the heat well. She not only visits clients in their home, but she also has clients she visits at a senior’s care facility, here in town. The rooms there, apparently, each have their own thermostats. And a lot of her clients have that sucker cranked right up, no matter the time of year it is.
She tells me that there are days when she comes out of a client’s room and has to take a moment to allow her body temperature to come back down to normal while she uses a tissue to mop the sweat from her brow. She shakes her head as she tells me, that sometimes, even in those environments, those poor people will complain of being cold.
I am beginning to understand that concept.
My internal thermostat has been off since I hit menopause, a while back. In the middle of the day—any day—I will either feel icy cold or very hot. Part of the cold, I understand, has to do with poorer circulation. That is especially true in my right foot—because of the veins they took out of my right leg during my emergency heart by-pass surgery in 2002.
My office is cooler than the rest of the house, and my feet can get very chilly, even though I am wearing socks and leg warmers and slippers. Later in the day, when I am “legs up” in my recliner, with a blanket covering those legs, from my knees to my ankles, I sometimes have the same problem.
I solved that dilemma about a month and a half ago. While in Walmart, I purchased an inexpensive fleece blanket, the small kind meant for sitting with, not for beds. I folded it in half lengthwise, and sewed it shut across the bottom and about a foot and a half up the side.
Mostly—when I’m in my recliner—I slip my legs (minus my slippers) into this hand-made “cubby-hole” for my feet, get those legs up, and cover myself as previously with my other fleece blanket. Within about fifteen minutes, sometimes sooner, my ankles and feet are toasty warm and I am a happy woman.
One other dilemma has no solution. Sometimes my knees will ache like a bad tooth-ache. So, I put my heating pad on them, and that begins to ease the discomfort. That wonderful device can also, unfortunately, trigger a hot flash.
My husband suggested, and yes, with a straight face at least until the words were out of his mouth, that on such occasions I apply an ice pack to my head. He said, that way, I could be a real earth mother: my knees would represent the tropics, my head with the ice pack, the north pole, and the rest of me, the temperate zone.
A sense of humor is a wonderful thing. But I digress.
Just like those dear souls my daughter cares for, I, too, have taken, from time-to-time, to raising the thermostat in the house. Most of the time, over the winter months, it’s set at seventy degrees. Last year, that was sufficient for all but a handful of days.
This past winter, however, and even as recently as last Sunday night, we dared to be wastrels, spendthrifts throwing away heating dollars as if they were so much flotsam and jetsam on the sea of life.
Yes, I think we’re making that leaving-middle age transition, because we dared to raise the setting on our thermostat from seventy degrees all the way up to seventy-two.
If you tell me that proves it, and it’s all downhill from here, I’m going to pretend I don’t hear you.
Love,
Morgan
