Cold Weather

Today is sunny with clouds and very breezy, not in a good way, but in a cold way because it's November.  I've never enjoyed the cold weather because it makes me freeze to the bone.  I wear layers of clothing even inside and that does help.  I'm terrified of being the old lady in the nursing home who isn't warm enough.  Note to my children:  I will need socks and sweaters/sweatshirts/sweatpants and I will need them all the time.  Never mind that the nursing home thermostat is set at 78.  That's not warm enough.  I will be freezing.  Now I feel much better knowing that my needs will be met.  When I was a little girl and the world was a very different place, girls were not allowed to wear pants to school.  We wore "school dresses."  School dresses were very different than "party dresses" or "church dresses," as both these categories were always frilly and fancy.  School dresses were always cotton, and usually some dark color of plaid.  They always had collars; some very large, some not so large and they always had a sash that tied behind or a belt of some sort at the waist.  I remember in vivid detail some of these dresses, because in the late fall in West Virginia where I grew up, the snow would begin falling and it did not stop falling until March.  And every now and then, it would refuse to give up even in March.  And my little girl friends and I would be sitting in a classroom in our plaid cotton dresses.  Freezing.  The schools I attended were heated by coal furnaces.  And almost daily our teacher would ask one of the kids in the classroom to please go to the furnace room and ask the janitor to stoke the furnace.  This was always a treat because our janitor (I don't think that's the occupational term any longer, but back then he was the janitor), Mr. Fields, wasn't always easy to find, so that meant you were allowed to freely roam the school building in search of Mr. Fields.  That generally allowed 15-20 minutes of thinking your were quite biggity because you were on a mission to find the most important man in the building - the man who controlled the heat, among other things.  Eventually, Mr. Fields would be found and within 60 minutes or so, the heat would rise and we who wore the little cotton dresses with little cotton slips underneath could endure a few more hours of school without shivering.  Did I mention these dresses almost always had short sleeves?  The only thing "winter" about them was their dark color.  If I remembered to complain to my mother, she would send me to school with an additional layer in the form of a cotton sweater.  It was a rough world, friends.  If the weather was extraordinarily bad, like 2 feet of snow, then we could wear pants, but they had to be removed the minute we arrived at school.  School was never called off.  And God forbid the power going off because we didn't go home.  We sat and continued to work and as the room began the big cool down, we donned our coats.  And we worked until it was time to go home.  I remember these bad, cold days.  Now that I think about it, maybe that's why I'm concerned about the nursing home....