Comfortable And Peaceful

It just came to me.

Two days ago, our heat pump, aging and creaking thing that it was, died on us. I discovered the problem on a morning when it was 26F outside. By that evening, it wasn’t much warmer inside.

To say that Christmas will be lean this year is to undersell the truth. Almost six grand to replace everything that needs replacing.  Tomorrow morning, the HVAC fellows will return and install the new unit. Or as my wife and I have begun calling it, our joint Christmas gift to each other. Some people take Caribbean cruises. The Orrs get big, heavy objects that heat and cool their home. We weren’t expecting this, obviously. As Clark said to Eddie, if I woke up tomorrow with my head sewn to the carpet, I couldn’t be more surprised than I am right now.

Anyway, as soon as the HVAC team confirmed our worst fears, we initiated our Cold Weather Emergency Strategy. This means that we closed off all the unessential rooms and have been keeping a good, steady fire going in the wood stove. A few minutes ago, I went into the spare bedroom in the back to fetch something. I flinched from the slap of cold air, and I hurried through my errand, shut the door behind me, tucked the flannel draft snake under the door, and came back out here when the fire is leaping behind the glass. The sense of comfort and peace was immediate as I sat down in my chair. Jinx is snoring in his bed about two feet from the stove, and Dixee is in her bed on the other side. Dixee is wearing her sweater. Jinx is not wearing his. He submitted to it briefly, but wore it with such a forlorn look that I removed it from him. He’s managing to stay warm without a silly garment on his spotted back.

The sense of comfort and peace.

I thought about this. And it just came to me.

When I was a child, we had no furnace, no central heat, no fireplace. We had two little gas stoves, one in the living room and one in the bathroom. None in the bedrooms. None were needed in the kitchen, where my mother was at the gas stove for much of the time we were home, and the oven heated the room nicely. We had concrete floors covered with cracked linoleum, and few rugs, so wintertime was brutally memorable for my skinny body.

When it was time for bed, I would run into my little bedroom, take off my two pairs of socks, and leap into bed, gasping at the flat frigidity of cotton percale.  Mother, right behind me, would cover me in about nine inches of quilts and blankets. She would kiss my forehead, tell me goodnight, and then pray with me. “Now I lay me down to sleep…” The next thing I knew, morning was poking at me with icy fingers. I would fight my way out of the forty pounds of bedclothes and sprint to the living room where the gas stove would be glowing. The floor around the stove was warm, and I would stand there and gather strength from the heat before beginning the rough rituals that usher in a child’s day. There was a sense of comfort and peace as I stood before the hissing stove with its blue and orange tongues, tongues holier and more revelatory than the Holy Ghost in any upper room full of skeptical followers in a desert climate. Your Matthews and Andrews had little need of sweaters, except perhaps at night, but the boy that became S.K. Orr never spared a thought for Middle Easterners or their climate or their apparel.

Comfortable and peaceful. Ah…that’s how it felt just now when I came out of that icebox of a spare bedroom and returned to a softly-lit rectangle of recliners and loveseats and drowsing wives and crammed bookshelves and snoring dogs. Comfortable and peaceful.

We’ll see how comfortable and peaceful I feel tomorrow when we write that check.

***

My sister recently mailed me a large, heavy box without giving me a heads-up. I lugged it into the house and opened it, and was so pleased to see that she had sent me a dozen photo albums full of pictures from our childhood. My wife and I spent hours going through them, permeated with memories and regrets and joys and what-ifs.

After we were done with the initial once-through, I stacked the albums in the office floor for the time being. Last night, I caught Jinx exploring the stack. His snout moved in and around the spines and page edges, his eyes half-closed and dreamy, his mouth slightly open. I watched him for a long time while he inhaled the musty odor of old Kodaks and Polaroids, snugged against their mild adhesive pages and shrouded beneath their yellowing plastic cover-sheets.

And I wondered what mind-pictures were whirling through his young dog-brain. What sorts of images did the smells conjure for him? Could he trace some connection between the silver-haired man a few feet away with the small squares of paper and chemicals pressed between the cardboard covers coated with floral fabrics? Could he sense the bemused melancholy the photos lit within me? Could he know that smell and memory are so closely linked, and that his master was even at that moment wishing that he could inhale a line of the motes of younger years, absorbing them, perhaps transforming himself — if only for a few minutes — in the way that people transform themselves into witty, energetic scrappers by use of cocaine?

Thanksgiving is a week from today. I am thankful for memories, and for dogs and for visual reminders and for flaming logs and for competent workmen and for Thor’s Days and for sausage and eggs and for soft cushions and hard, brittle starlight glaring down at me when I step into the yard and crane my neck up, up, looking always up. Some of those objects up there twinkle, and some of them do not. Some things down here bring comfort and peace, and some do not.

Praise be for the cold rooms and for the warm ones. They chase each other around, you see.

~ S.K. Orr