coldness

I've left New York for the holiday, taking the bus to Philadelphia this morning with a promise to go through my old closet and throw things away so my parents could have a little less clutter.

I got here ready to do some major closet cleaning, but it wasn't so clear what I was supposed to sort through, and my mom was at work, so I spent a few hours rereading letters I'd received from friends when I was in college. What's most interesting about these letters is that they were written right on the cusp of email-- one friend tells me that she has a new account that she's sharing with a friend-- and there are no letters from friends who did have email. There are also some really sweet and funny notes from my grandfather, who had just turned 90 and was designing and building a secretary for me. It's nice to remember that he was so sharp and witty; he was so frail and grumpy his final few years. (He lived to be 99 and a half, if you're wondering.)

I'm currently waiting for my mother to get home from teaching. Christopher is coming tonight and my dad is also flying in from his vacation to India (yeah, I know). My father is a major DIYer, and sometime this summer he disconnected the heat vents in order to do some maintenance (perhaps he was going to install an AC unit?), and never bothered to reconnect them. It wasn't so bad throughout the fall, but the last few weeks --weeks when Dad was in balmy India-- my mother has been freezing here. The house is very drafty and has 14' ceilings, so it's also not so easy to just cuddle up with a space heater. Hopefully this will be solved before Thursday, but in the meantime I'm cold. It's almost paralyzing. I am baking some sweet potatoes in hopes that the kitchen will warm up a few degrees, and I have on my hat and a heavy wool sweater and a blanket wrapped around my shoulders. I wish I had my fingerless gloves...

(photo added 11/28)