...and it might be a winter like winter this year
It's the 23rd of May, which in this part of the world means effectively the third week of November. There's a full moon out, tiny and cold and distant, painting the nightscape in shades of ice and silver. And it's actually cold: 3C, according to the BoM, which gives the corresponding "apparent temperature" as 1.2C. The night before, we had the first frost of the season in the middle suburbs, so the outer ones and the up-country places must have had frost aplenty. There has also been some rain. And spates of several days of grey, gloomy overcast from dawn to dark. Local people tell me that Melbourne used to have winters like this, but not for at least a decade...until now.
It's lovely! But it's worth noting that today at the market - I was well enough to go, and lasted through most of the trekking until my batteries ran out and I had to splat in the car again - I was wearing a light shawl over a summer top, and bare feet in mules, and that was more than enough to keep me comfortably warm...so not quite real winter, eh?
There's a quintessentially Aussie sight in winter: people wearing heavy jackets or hoodies, scarves/mufflers, gloves - and shorts. Shorts. The mind boggles.
Meanwhile, winter means indoor heating. Himself was home fluey-sick today - he should have been home sick yesterday, because he was far more ill then, but he's the office manager and dislikes taking time off for mere illness, not that he's ill very often anyway - and decided to eschew the use of our sole wall-mounted gas heater (which has no thermostat and features two states, Off and Incinerate) and opt instead for the luxury of our partly-repaired aircon's heat cycle. Wonderful! Gentle, constant, thermostat-regulated warmth, completely free of blasting desiccating hot air that fries the mucous membranes. And he's currently asleep sitting up (to keep his air passages clear, poor thing) and neither choking nor snoring. And I've been on the other settee, working. And the point of this post is:
I'd forgot the reassuringness, the safeness, the rightness of the sound of central heating in the middle of the night. That whisper of warm air through vents, or the sound of the boiler firing up for hot-water radiators. I'd forgot how much a part of home-back-home it was. Cold moon outside the window, frost forming in the garden, and the encompassing womblike warmth of real heating. And instead of making me homesick, it's making me feel closer to home...even though I know in my bones that this is not May weather and that the world is in blossom in my homeland and that everything down here is upside-down and backwards. It's a soul-satisfying feeling. It makes me feel more alive and less mortal.
It's good to be warm in the winter.
.
It's lovely! But it's worth noting that today at the market - I was well enough to go, and lasted through most of the trekking until my batteries ran out and I had to splat in the car again - I was wearing a light shawl over a summer top, and bare feet in mules, and that was more than enough to keep me comfortably warm...so not quite real winter, eh?
There's a quintessentially Aussie sight in winter: people wearing heavy jackets or hoodies, scarves/mufflers, gloves - and shorts. Shorts. The mind boggles.
Meanwhile, winter means indoor heating. Himself was home fluey-sick today - he should have been home sick yesterday, because he was far more ill then, but he's the office manager and dislikes taking time off for mere illness, not that he's ill very often anyway - and decided to eschew the use of our sole wall-mounted gas heater (which has no thermostat and features two states, Off and Incinerate) and opt instead for the luxury of our partly-repaired aircon's heat cycle. Wonderful! Gentle, constant, thermostat-regulated warmth, completely free of blasting desiccating hot air that fries the mucous membranes. And he's currently asleep sitting up (to keep his air passages clear, poor thing) and neither choking nor snoring. And I've been on the other settee, working. And the point of this post is:
I'd forgot the reassuringness, the safeness, the rightness of the sound of central heating in the middle of the night. That whisper of warm air through vents, or the sound of the boiler firing up for hot-water radiators. I'd forgot how much a part of home-back-home it was. Cold moon outside the window, frost forming in the garden, and the encompassing womblike warmth of real heating. And instead of making me homesick, it's making me feel closer to home...even though I know in my bones that this is not May weather and that the world is in blossom in my homeland and that everything down here is upside-down and backwards. It's a soul-satisfying feeling. It makes me feel more alive and less mortal.
It's good to be warm in the winter.
.