Wednesday, 06 February 2002 | Capes made of blankets

If you sit directly on the slanted hardwood floor, you catch the cold draft that constantly pours in from somewhere (some hidden gaping hole you can never find) right on the spot where your shirt doesn't quite meet your pants, that banana-shaped slice of exposed skin particularly sensitive to those cold fingers of air that wrap around you like an unwelcome embrace.

If, while standing, you hold your hands straight up in the air, or, better yet, if you stand on a chair or a table, you discover what happened to the heat that blows out of that tired, overworked vent above your head: it hangs like a dense cloud above you in the space between the tops of your shelves and the 10-foot ceilings, a pocket of invisible warmth that floats at an inconvenient latitude, exactly where you appreciate it the least. You spend most of your time in the world in between, cursing the extremes above and below, unable to get them to desegregate, make peace, be friends. You give up and shuffle around the house in capes made of blankets.