It must have been close to eleven o clock. I was in bed drifting in and out of sleep when I heard the bedroom door pop open. I felt the covers move and the bed settle.
“I wonder what Cheryl was doing up?” I thought. And then it hit me, right in the center of my back. It was cold and wet.
“Yike!” I screamed, and shot out of bed only to be stopped by a face plant into the sheet rock wall. Holding my bloody nose I raked the wall with my hand until I was able to flip on the bedroom light. There laying beside my sleeping wife was Milton Barry my curfew violating granddog who had come in the house through the doggy-door, wet and cold after carousing all evening with the field rabbits. The darn thing crawled into my bedding and snuggled up to me to warm his nose.
I have always had bad reactions to cold on my back. Once my massage therapist came into the session after having a snowball fight while not wearing gloves. When she put her hands on my back I shot out of the room nearly naked. I suspect she has seen it all anyway.
I would say the problem at our house stems from the fact that I am too cheap to turn the heat up past 65 degrees in the winter and at night the thermostat gets set at 60. We have never had a pipe freeze but Milton refuses to drink out of his water dish in the kitchen until we scrape off the slush.
I see nothing wrong with needing to wear heavy wool socks and slippers in the house and pre-warming the toilet seat. I also like the comfort of burrowing myself under a mountain of blankets in bed, head included. It’s like sleeping in a pup tent. After a while my breath heats up the tent to a point where the temperature is livable.
And yet Cheryl still finds a need to crawl into bed and push her cold toes into my back after walking barefoot through the house. The reaction is always the same: Sparks fly off my head like a Tesla Coil, there usually is a piercing scream followed by me shooting out of bed only to run into my now cracked sheet rock wall.
It always ends the same. Cheryl mutters, “Sorry. Maybe now we can turn up the thermostat.”
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One reply on “Noses and Toeses”
I don’t know how one pre-warms a toilet seat, and I’m almost afraid to ask. (Rub the seat briskly with one’s hands just before eating your bedtime snack of finger foods?) I love the subtle ending.