LOVE THRUSDAY
Cindy Maddera
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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.