Too Hot To Write

People have been emailing me to ask why the gap in blogs during the last week. For those of you who don’t live on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, let me tell you that we have been embroiled in a horrendous heat wave over the last week or so. While the bedroom in our house is air conditioned, the rest of the house has not been up until now. Writing a blog would have necessitated sweating my socks off in my un-air conditioned study. Having been raised in the United Kingdom where in my formative years 70 degrees Fahrenheit, without humidity, was considered a heat wave, for a delicate Northern European soul such as myself it is hard to breathe let alone form a coherent thought when the mercury rises to 90 degrees with humidity. Yes, I know that there are places in the world where you can fry an egg on the hood of a car and people still survive, (my brother, Mark, lives in the Sultanate of Oman which I understand has such a climate) but you’ll notice that I don’t live in one of those places! Regardless, I am happy to report that I am now fully air-conditioned and reporting for (blogging) duty.

While we’re on the subject of hot and cold weather, I must freely confess that I am one of those human beings who thrives in cold climates. There is a good reason why I live in Massachusetts…I love frigid weather! While I could happily do without icy roads and sidewalks, I love plunging temperatures and the bristling nose hair sensation that accompanies the aforementioned downward slide of the mercury. (Those of you who live in icy climates know exactly what I mean about nose hairs that feel like they will freeze up and drop off.)

In my therapy office, the air conditioning belts out frigid air throughout the summer (which is one of the reasons why I keep a blanket on the back of the couch for my poor shivering clients). In the winter, I am happy to wrap myself in a wool shawl (my constant office companion) and keep the heating down lower. Like most human beings on the planet, my mother’s words still ring in my head, yea these many years later. “If you’re cold, put on a jumper, dear!” (Jumper = Sweater in UK speak). So put on a jumper I do! Now that I’m thinking about it, it occurs to me that I like to wrap myself in a wool wrap no matter whether the temperature is artificially icy in my office due to the wonders of a/c or because it’s winter and frosty by natural means. My mother was a great believer in swaddling her infants (all four of us or so I am led to believe) so the therapist in me believes that this is where my passion for being “wrapped” comes from. It feels comfortable, cozy and safe for me to be swathed in fabric, even if I am now responsible for my own swaddling. (Witness the power of self-psychology, folks!)

This lengthy piece of therapist self-disclosure was to thank those people who have emailed me to ask why I wasn’t writing, and to explain the reasons for my brief absence. More later…