THANKFUL FRIDAY

Sometime back in the Spring, Misti made me download the Red Cross emergency app. Part of it came out of a text conversation we were having where she had texted me to see if we were okay and I was all shrug-your-shoulders and replied with “yeah, why wouldn’t we be?” Apparently there had been a tornado somewhere around me but we were oblivious. In fact we’d slept through the whole storm situation. This is where I confess that I am willfully oblivious to numbers and weather. I don’t pay attention to how much something costs (unless it’s unreasonable) and I don’t pay attention to the weather. My method of determining the weather is to stick my head outside and look up at the sky. If the sky is clear when I do this in the morning, then the weather must be okay for the scooter. You should know that I have been caught in the rain on the scooter more times when consulting Michael and his weather app than I have with my usual method.

I still don’t really know what the temperature or rain percentage is going to be on any given day, but the emergency app does send me an alert when I need to take shelter. I am sure this is a relief to those people who love me and know that I like to live dangerously. Every day this week, I have been alerted multiples times a day of excessive heat. That is because Kansas City has exceeded previous record temperatures with heat indices in the 120s. Summers in Oklahoma are legendary for months of 100 degree temperatures and consecutive days without rain. So for years, I’ve rolled my eyes at the people of Kansas City complaining about the heat. “Its not the heat.” They’d protest. “Its the humidity.” They’d moan.

This is the first summer where I am not rolling my eyes at the complaints. I can’t understand how there can be so much moisture in the air without rain. I drove to work with the windshield wipers on twice this week because there was so much condensation on the window, but there was not any rain. Yes, I drove my car because it is too hot to ride the scooter. TOO HOT TO RIDE THE SCOOTER! Half the doors in our house are swollen and stick. I basically body slammed my way through the front door Wednesday evening. Air handlers at work have been struggling and there was even talk of delaying experiments this week. Josephine and I still do our morning walks, but even at 5:30 in the morning the air is oppressive. Josephine comes in from the walk and belly flops onto the cool floor. The Weatherman I was listening to at the beginning of the week said “If you have activities planned for outside…just don’t.”

Just don’t.

A cold front is moving in this evening that promises to drop our temperatures into the high seventies and low eighties. I predict that all surrounding states will be able to hear the collective sigh of relief from the people here. The woeful question of “why is it sooooooo hoooooottttttttt?!?!” will be replaced with exclamations of gratitude. It reminds me of that time in grad-school when we’d had forty something days without rain. Then one evening it started raining and everyone in our apartment complex opened their doors and we all just stood in our doorways staring at the rain. Occasionally we’d converse back and forth and laugh over this and that, but most of us were just watching the rain. That’s what’s going to happen around 9:00 PM here tonight.

We have such great capacities for gratitude but some times, a little discomfort is required for us to be aware just how great that capacity can be.

LOVE THRUSDAY

Hands

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He tells me that my hands are a barometer and that winter is coming. I am standing in the kitchen putting quinoa and chopped sweet potatoes into the rice cooker while my breakfast cooks in a skillet behind me. He's just peeled himself from his bed and wandered into the kitchen to get a drink of water before jumping in the shower to get ready for work. His hair is sticking out at all angles and his eyes are all squinty. He wraps his arms around my waist and rest his chin on my shoulder as I stir the contents of the rice cooker before placing my hand over his. 

"Winter is coming" He says.

He tells me he knows because the other night, only my finger tips were cold to the touch. Now the cold has moved all the way into the last section of of my fingers. The cold has moved from the distal phalanx, on through the middle phalanx and has settled into the proximal phalanx. He tells me that soon the cold will creep all the way into the palm of my hand. That's when he'll know for sure that winter is here. My hands do not tell fortunes or cast spells, but they tell you the weather. 

Meanwhile he is always radiating heat. The miserly old man inside me refuses to turn the heat on until November. As the evenings grow increasingly colder, I move from my side of the couch to his side. It's the equivalent to placing a hot stone at your side or hot water bottle in your bed. I do my best to avoid touching bare skin with my icy hands, but it's inevitable that this will happen. Depending on the situation that contact will be met with a gasp or yelp. I try to be mindful not to induce a yelp, but sometimes it's unavoidable.

He is always hot and I am always cold. The electric blanket on my bed stopped working last winter, but because I had nothing else, I put it back on the bed when it turned cold. The other night I shivered as I climbed under the covers into my cold bed. Michael said that he loved climbing into cool sheets. I shivered and rolled into a ball letting my roly poly impression reflect my disdain for crawling into a cold bed. He told me to buy a new electric blanket. He is still sleeping under a thin sheet and measly comforter.  

We are a temperature example of the basic rule of magnetism: like poles repel and unlike poles attract. 

Happy Love Thursday.