Thirty below

The cold came more than once this month, and last week it settled in. For a few mornings it was well below zero when I got up, and with the wind off the lake the radio said it felt like thirty below, or worse, depending on which hill you stood on. At that temperature the air hurts your teeth. Your nose freezes shut on the first breath. The snow stops squeaking underfoot and starts to creak, like a floorboard.

I'd forgotten that. I'd forgotten a lot of it. I'd remembered winter here as a story I told people in Seattle, and the story was true, but it was missing the part where the car makes a noise when you start it that sounds like an apology.

At the office, the frost grew on the inside of the windows. We have tall windows, which is half of why we took the room, and by Tuesday each pane had a forest of white ferns in its lower corners, thick enough to write in with a fingernail. Owen wrote the date in one. I wrote the temperature in another. The radiators knocked all day, at full stretch, doing their honest best, and we worked in our coats until about eleven.

At ten on Tuesday the man who owns the print shop downstairs came up the stairs, which he has never done, with a space heater under one arm. He has run that shop for thirty-one years and has opinions about paper weights that he'll share if you stand still. He set the heater down, told us to leave the kitchenette faucet dripping overnight or we'd be calling a plumber who wouldn't come, and said he keeps the shop warmer than he needs on mornings like this, because heat rises, and we're welcome to it. Then he went back down. The heater says "PROPERTY OF THE PRINT SHOP" on a label in his handwriting, in case we get ideas.

My mother is a few minutes away and perfectly capable, as she'll tell anyone, but on the worst days I had her groceries delivered so she wouldn't drive, the way I used to from Seattle. She called to say the oranges were very good and the delivery man was very young and she had given him cocoa.

It's supposed to get above freezing this week, and people at the grocery store are already talking about it like a holiday. Everything is relative.

What's the coldest you've ever been, and what got you warm again?