If you don't know Stephanie, you are really missing out. She was the last one of my old crew of friends to leave me. At least she didn't leave the state or the country. The Pillings only moved a few miles away, but it's just over that natural hump of magic distance that makes it just enough of an inconvenience we don't get together often. Luckily, we still like each other so we are doing a date night babysitting swap. And we're trying to be regular about it. Time will tell.
Friday night I watched their kids so they could catch a movie. Brian brought our kids. They played for an hour, then we cleaned the toys up. We sent the Zufelts home to bed with Dad. Mom stayed. We got Penny brushed, changed and snuggled in her bed, then into Margot's room. Books littered the floor. I suggested we could clean them up. Margot, the most precocious child I believe I have EVER met, said she prefers to clean books in the morning. I urged that it would be a great and happy surprise for her mom and dad if they were magically away when they came home. She plead her case like a seventeen year old rather than a four year old. After a bit of a sales pitch, she was finally presuaded.
I got down on my knees, grabbed a load of books and crawled toward the bookcase. I stopped dead in my tracks. What was that AMAZING warmth I felt? Oh my. This is wonderful. I was paralyzed. Memories flooded into my mind. Heaven. This is what heaven feels like. I'm positive this is heaven.
Turns out the Pillings have natural gas. This means they have a REAL heater. It blows out WARM air. It is AMAZING. I'm not going to lie. I considered asking Margot if I could sleep on her floor on the heater vent. I decided against it. Now as I think it over two days later, I should have snuck into Stephanie's room and slept on her heater vent.
See, our house has electric heat. The body temperature is 98.6 degrees F. We all set our heaters at 68 or 72 or whatever. Warm air, but cooler than our bodies. Our electric heat pump blows out air warmer than the 68 degrees we set our heater at, but much, much cooler than my body temperature. The net result is that the room warms up. It just isn't warm and cozy to have blowing on you. In fact my assigned chair at the kitchen table gets direct blowing from the heater and sometimes I have to move seats at dinner because it's too cold with the "heater" blowing directly on me. It's miserable.
Gas heaters, on the other hand, blow out some serious hot air. It's divine. Like I said, a piece of heaven. I have many memories a little girl of sitting directly on the heater vent. Sunday was the best day to do it. You come home from church in your dress and crouch down on the vent. Your dress puffs up huge with warm, delightful air. Pure bliss. My sister and I would fight over who got to sit by the vent in the bathroom. The vent was right above the scale. You would shut the door to trap all the warm air and sit on the scale. During my late elementary school years through high school I would get a book to read with a pillow and blanket. Lay with your feet on the vent, tightly wrap the blanket around your body to capture all that warm air and enjoy the afternoon with a good book.
It's been years since I could enjoy the heater bliss. We get coldish-warm air here in our Virginia home. In Texas we had good heat but it came through the ceiling. Just a little hard to sit on the ceiling. In college we had steam radiators that could burn you if you touched them. Oh the longing. I may just have to see if I can move in to Stephanie's house for the rest of the winter. Or maybe she can rent me some time to toast my toes on her warm, warm air.
Sometimes in the midst of a new adventure in your life, you forget things you love. It's the simple things in life that make it good, isn't it?
