Jack Frost, Criminal Mastermind or Savior?

I am sitting here wearing two pairs of sweatpants, a sweater, wool stockings and a sweatshirt with a hood. I just drank my sixth cup of hot tea in an attempt to warm myself from the inside out. The heat is cranked up to 72 degrees but still, I can’t seem to thaw out. Winter definitely is here.

The truth is, I love winter. In fact, it ranks right up there on my list of favorite seasons. Am I a skier? A snowmobiler? A skater? Do I run a snowplowing business? Nope.

I love winter because there are no bugs.

Call me cruel, but the thought of all of the creepy crawly things that come out in the summer, now lying stiff and cold under a ton of snow somewhere, unable to hum, buzz, bite or sting, really pleases me. In fact, if they just could stay frozen for the rest of the year, I’d be one very happy person.

There are a lot of other things I love about winter, though. For example, cold weather is refreshing and invigorating. I love to bundle up and take long walks in the snow out in the woods, especially since I don’t have to worry about later stripping off my clothes and doing a full-body tick check. And it’s a scientific fact that walking or jogging in frigid weather burns more calories than walking or jogging in hot weather.

This year, however, I must confess that the frigid temperatures already have resulted in a few incidents that have made me love winter just a little bit less than in previous years.

First of all, on our street, the mail is delivered to outside lock-boxes at the bottom of the hill. For three days last week, the lock on our box was frozen solid. The worst part was that I knew my paycheck was sitting in that box, so I was eager (make that desperate) to get into it.

I heated my key with a cigarette lighter. The lock wouldn’t turn. I pounded on the door with my fists. Still nothing. I stood out in the wind and held an insulated glove over the lock to warm it…until I got so cold, icicles began to hang from my nostrils. Still nothing. Upset, I drove to the post office to complain.

“Well, you can have someone build a shelter around the boxes,” the postal employee told me.

Hiring a carpenter and waiting for him to build a shelter didn’t exactly sound like a speedy way to get my paycheck.

“Or you can try squirting some WD-40 into the lock,” he added.

“Can’t you just have the guy who put the mail into the boxes get it out again?” I asked. “He obviously knows some secret I don’t!”

“I can’t ask him,” he answered. “He’s not back from his route yet.”

I ended up buying some lock de-icer, which, after several squirts, accompanied by a few well-aimed whacks, finally opened the box. When I, at long last, got my frozen little paws on my paycheck, I rushed down to the bank. The lobby was closed, but the drive-up lane still was open. There were four cars in line ahead of me when I pulled in.

I sat there for at least 15 minutes before I finally made it to the front of the line.
That’s when I discovered that my car window was frozen shut. I pushed on it. I aimed the heater vent toward it. It wouldn’t budge. When I looked in my rearview mirror and read the lips of the guy in the car behind me, I figured that unless he was singing along with some song on the radio that had a lot of four-letter words in it, I’d probably be better off just opening my car door and getting out to do my transaction. The problem was, I’d parked so close to the concrete island, there was no room to open my door. Muttering, I drove off, my paycheck lying uncashed on the front seat and taunting me.

And the other night, I came very close to repeating a cold-weather mistake I’d made a few years ago; a mistake that had required my husband to use a blow dryer on my hand…because it was frozen to our back door.

I was doing the dishes when my dog, obviously in a hurry to do her “duty,” whined at the door. Hastily, I dried my hands and went to let her out.

Fortunately, in the nick of time I remembered that metal storm-doors and damp, dishpan hands make a dangerous combination in sub-zero weather…unless you’re a criminal who wants to lose his ability to ever be fingerprinted again.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that my own left pinky still is fingerprintless.

Maybe spiders and ticks aren’t so bad after all.

Paging Florence Nightingale

I was in one of the malls the other day and the place sounded like a refuge for wild geese. It seemed as if just about everyone in there was honking, sneezing or coughing. I even walked behind one man who, without exaggeration, sneezed with every step he took. I got away from him…fast.

Needless to say, I came home feeling as if I were a giant, walking germ. “Don’t come near me!” I said to my husband as I backed away from him. “I need to take a bath in Lysol. I feel like Typhoid Mary!”

He laughed, thinking I was joking, but I was serious. The last thing I wanted was for him to catch something. You see, too vividly, and in recurrent nightmares, I still recall the last time he came down with the flu.

I remember the day as if it were yesterday. At first, I tried to deny the inevitable. When he started sneezing, I attributed it to using too much pepper on his mashed potatoes. When he said his throat was sore, I reasoned that it was because the house was too dry. And when he began to look flushed, I passed it off as a male hot flash.

But when he developed the chills, a temperature of 101, and a cough that rattled the windows, I had to face the truth. The flu had reared its ugly head and claimed another victim…and I, the farthest thing from Florence Nightingale imaginable, was going to have to take care of him.

“Let me take your temperature,” I said to my husband that first night, as I shook down the thermometer.

“Noooo!” he whined. “If I keep my mouth closed with the thermometer in it, I won’t be able to breathe through my stuffed-up nose! I’ll suffocate!”

“Well, I can take your temperature another way, if you’d like,” I said calmly.

It’s amazing how long he managed to hold his breath while the thermometer was in his mouth.

Still, even though he looked as if he’d been run over by a train, he was determined to go to work the next morning. “There’s an important meeting I HAVE to attend,” he said when I threatened to tie him to the bedpost to keep him home. “You don’t want me to lose my job and end up unemployed, do you? Then you’d have to go out and get a regular 9-to-5 job.”

I packed his lunch.

The next morning, the alarm rang at 5:30. My husband sat up, swung his legs over the edge of the bed and slid one foot into his slipper. Twenty minutes later, he still was sitting on the edge of the bed.

I finally asked him what he was doing. “I’m trying to get up the energy to put on my other slipper,” he said.

That did it. I called his office and said he wouldn’t be in. Thus began two of the longest weeks of my life.

For one thing, I thought he would stay in bed all day and either sleep or watch the portable TV in the bedroom. But he wanted to watch the big TV, so he parked his aching body in his recliner out in the living room from early morning till late at night, about 125 hours a day.

So instead of my favorite TV shows, I was forced to watch countless reruns of CHIPs and Gunsmoke. If any show dared to show even a hint of romance, my husband had his finger on the remote control with such lightning speed, he outdrew Marshal Dillon.

And then there was the ice cream incident. Because of his sore throat, my husband wanted ice cream to soothe it. Of course, on the particular day that he absolutely had to have it, the second coming of the Ice Age was in progress. I wouldn’t even have sent my dogs out in weather like that, but my husband’s whining made me decide to brave the elements and risk wrapping my car around a tree. I drove only as far as the nearest variety store, however, which had a limited selection of items.

My husband specifically had requested Hood brand Patchwork ice cream, which is nothing more than squares of chocolate ice cream and vanilla ice cream put together to look like a patchwork quilt. Naturally, the small store had no such thing, so I, being clever, bought a container of Hood chocolate ice cream and one of Hood vanilla. I figured I’d just cut them into squares and put them together in the same dish, and my husband would be none the wiser.

It didn’t work. “This isn’t Patchwork,” he complained after only one bite.

“It’s the same exact ice cream,” I told him. “It’s just that the little squares didn’t come all hitched together, that’s all!”

“Well, I don’t like it,” he said, pushing the dish away.

I was tempted to hold him down and force-feed the ice cream to him, but I knew that Florence Nightingale never would have done anything like that, so I refrained.

The worst part of the flu was my husband’s coughing, which kept both of us awake all night. Six days into his illness, after we both looked so haggard from lack of sleep, we could have landed roles in the movie, “Night of the Living Dead,” he finally told me to call the family doctor and make an appointment. The moment I dialed the number, however, he changed his mind.

Ten times a day, it was the same thing: “Call the doctor.” “Don’t call the doctor.” “Make an appointment.” “Don’t make an appointment.” I was ready to drink hemlock.

“Maybe I have pneumonia now,” my husband groaned after yet another night of endless coughing and wheezing. “Or it could even be something much worse!” Despite his obvious concern, he still wouldn’t allow me to call the doctor.

“Well, we’ll find out for sure what you had when they perform the autopsy,” I said, shrugging.

It’s miraculous just how quickly he recovered after that.