The Morning the House Turned Cold

By Mark Morgan

There was always one morning every fall when summer finally gave up.

Nobody announced it.

We didn't have a phone buzzing on the nightstand telling us there was a cold front moving through. You found out the old-fashioned way.

You stuck one bare foot out from under the covers.

Then you jerked it right back in.

Weather report complete.

It was cold.

Not frozen-water-bucket cold. Just cold enough that getting out of bed suddenly required some serious thinking.

All summer we'd slept with windows cracked open and fans running. Then that first chilly morning somebody would holler:

"Who left that window open?"

Usually it was the same person who'd been hollering all summer not to close it.

That's when you went hunting for socks.

Matching wasn't important.

Clean was negotiable.

Warm was the only qualification that mattered.

Eventually somebody said the words we'd all been waiting for:

"Might be time to turn the heat on."

Now, the first firing of the furnace was an annual family event.

That old thing would rumble to life, and about thirty seconds later the whole house smelled like somebody had put a dust bunny in a frying pan.

We never worried much about it.

Somebody would say, "It's just burning the dust off."

That explanation covered an awful lot of things back then.

If it smelled funny, rattled a little, and wasn't actually on fire, we generally figured everything was fine.

Then came the search for the winter clothes.

You'd open a closet and find seventeen gloves.

Not one pair.

I never understood that.

Somewhere in America there must be a mountain of single gloves waiting on their partners to come home.

The coats were better.

Reach into an old coat pocket and you might find fifty cents, a cough drop, a grocery receipt, or a peppermint that had melted itself right through the wrapper.

It was like finding buried treasure, only stickier.

Then somebody dragged out the quilts.

Those weren't those little blankets you see today that weigh about as much as a dish towel.

I'm talking about a real quilt.

The kind that once it was laid across you, your plans for the evening were officially over.

Some were pieced together from old shirts and scraps of cloth. Nothing matched much, but somehow it all belonged together.

I suppose that's what made them beautiful.

And before long, everybody started gathering back inside.

That's the part I remember most.

Summer seemed to scatter us.

There were yards to mow, places to go, bicycles to ride, gardens to fool with, and daylight that seemed like it might last forever.

Then fall showed up.

The days got shorter.

The house got warmer.

And somehow we all found our way back to the kitchen table.

Today we've got thermostats we can control from our phones, heated seats in our cars, and blankets with more settings than the television.

That's all mighty handy.

But I don't think any of it can improve much on an old quilt, a warm kitchen, and a cup of coffee when the wind is rattling around outside.

There's an old saying that you don't know how warm the fire is until you've been out in the cold.

I reckon that's true about life, too.

We spend an awful lot of time looking down the road for something better and sometimes forget to look around at what's already keeping us warm.

A familiar house.

An old chair.

Something hot to drink.

And somebody sitting across the table who knows all your stories and listens to them anyway.

Maybe that first cold morning wasn't really telling us winter was coming.

Maybe it was reminding us of something we'd forgotten during the busy summer.

Sometimes the best part of going out into the world is having somewhere warm to come back to.