Wind chill
The wind is whipping through this house as if the walls have simply given up. Strange harmonics develop in the leaky, squeaky nooks of the outer walls as the gusts build up and relent. My son, whose bedroom is on the front lines of this attack from the west, says it sounds like someone is playing the cello in there. And playing it badly. We recently replaced all the windows in our house with expensive, thermally efficient, double-paned glass. Twenty-six windows! The new windows are tight as a drum; it’s the rest of the wall space that leaks now. If you want to stay warm in this house on a cold windy day, you stand in front of a window.
This morning I did just that, stood in front of a bay window of our house with my coffee cup warming my hands and looked out. The wind howled ferociously, picking up and redepositing yesterday’s snowfall as if by design, correcting for mistakes in the original distribution – too much here, not enough there.
The newspaper reports a wind chill or “real feel” temperature of -14 degrees Fahrenheit today. This makes me laugh. Don’t tell me how cold I feel. How dare they quantify a feeling. The sight and sound of the wind’s busy work are enough for me to know that it is cold outside. Words do a better job than numbers to describe a feeling. It’s cold as shit. Okay? Cold as a witch’s tit. Of course, I don’t suppose they would print that in a newspaper. At one point as I was standing there mindlessly staring and thinking, the wind gusted and surprised me by pelting my window with snow. I hugged myself and rubbed my arms just at the thought of being outside. Yeah, it’s cold alright. Cold as the caked snow on a Husky dog’s snout. Minus fourteen my ass.
10:21:26 AM  Stories
|
|
