The weather is such a stupid thing to write about, unless it’s some abstract take on climate or clouds or annual rainfall figures. Even then. But the gas company sent someone two or three weeks ago to make sure everything was working. Easier to stretch that job out than to have ten thousand emergencies the same afternoon. I have a hot water tank out back and, for the life of me, I have no idea which is mine. I take hot showers every day, so I use gas. The hot water never runs out, which means I probably share a large tank with someone else. But I’ve also had a wall heater for the last year and a half and never once turned it on. In fact, I wasn’t sure how to turn it on. So I asked the gas man if he could just turn it off. He wasn’t sure what I meant by that. “It is off,” he said. “Off. Disconnected. Defunct. Make it so it can’t be turned on. And make it so no gas leaks into the room.” “Ah,” he said, knowingly. You could see in his eyes that I was one of those crazies afraid of gas. So after a few minutes with a wrench he announced, “It’s, um, disconnected.”

I’ve probably been afraid of gas all my life. I have visions of dead people sleeping in gas filled rooms. The water heater is far enough away that it's safe. But the wall heater… Well, it was right next to me. Now the danger has been removed.

But now it’s creeping into the 30s at night. I read with a t-shirt, a long sleeved shirt, a hooded sweatshirt, and a nylon shell, over flannel pajamas with a sock hat for good measure. I tell myself that the cold doesn’t last very long. And it doesn’t. In a few weeks it will start to get warm again. In the mean time my fingers shake as I turn the pages. I close the book and think how stupid it was to disconnect the heater. He was right there. All I had to say was, “How do you turn this damn thing on?”