Baby, It’s Cold Inside This Bedroom

The temperature plummeted to 11 degrees outside my bedroom window early Monday morning.

Gee, that’s a coincidence. That was the temperature inside my bedroom, too.

You see, my bedroom window was open all night, providing me with plenty of fresh air, so fresh that it nearly put a layer of frost on my water glass. Actually, it nearly put a layer of frost on my something else, something that rhymes with “glass,” because my comforter slipped off briefly during the night.

The problem is, I am married to a woman who believes in the health-giving properties of fresh air, especially the health-giving properties of Arctic air. She is terrified of waking up hot in the middle of the night, not a serious concern at this latitude even in July, yet she worries about it even in December and January. She knows that the room temperature might get down only into 40s with the window closed, so she opens it up every night so the subfreezing breezes can blow in unimpeded from the Yukon.

She came by this naturally, during her youth in Cody, Wyo. I blame it on cat-windows. She has always had cats, and she has always kept a window partially open so her cats can go catting around at night. Thus she grew up to believe that it was only natural to wake up every morning to attractive clouds of breath-generated fog.

I should not blame this all on my wife. The fact is, I vastly prefer cold nights, too. This also comes from my childhood, growing up at high altitude. At high altitude, the nighttime temperature often plunges to below freezing, sometimes even in August. So I have always deplored warm nights, and I have never, ever kept the heat on in my bedroom.

This is not a big issue, since I don’t actually have heat in my bedroom. Maybe I should have repaired that heater when it broke about eight years ago. But what’s the point? The heat would all get sucked directly out the open window anyway. I can’t afford to heat my back yard.

Anyway, I believe that a cold bedroom is the best, especially when warm and toasty under a big down comforter. Nothing is more comforting than burrowing under one of those in an icy bedroom in December. Those people who sleep with the heat on will never know the joy of a down comforter, although I suppose they might know the joy of sweating miserably under one.

No, I have no problem with sleeping in an Antarctic bedroom. My only problem is getting up in one. Do you have any idea how much will power it takes to jump out of bed into a room the temperature of Base Camp III on Mount Everest?

More will power than I have, no question about that. Most mornings in the winter, I lie there snug and warm under a 4-foot-tall pile of down comforter, thinking how miserable I’ll be when I get out of bed, and how toasty I am right now, except for my nose, the only exposed part of myself, which I can no longer feel.

So I lie there for five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, trying to work up the gumption to get out of bed. This is even longer than I lie in my sleeping bag on cold winter camping mornings when I have nothing to look forward to except getting up and thawing my boots.

Yet in the wilderness I know I have no choice. It’s either get up and thaw the boots, or lie there and die and stick my family with the bill for hauling out my remains by pack mule. In my bedroom, I can seriously ponder the possibility of lying in bed until April, or even May if we have a cool spring.

The only thing that finally gets me out from under the pile is the knowledge that a hot, hot shower is only 12 feet away in the adjoining bathroom. With a sudden burst of energy, I explode out from under that comforter and race to the shower, grabbing a robe in one graceful motion.

If my timing is good, I can be from comforter to hot shower in 14.3 seconds, which is so quick that the hypothermia can’t progress past the preliminary stages.

So I luxuriate in the hot steam of my shower. And I luxuriate. And I luxuriate. I decide to stay in there forever. Do you have any idea how cold it’s going to be when I get out?

, DataTimes MEMO: To leave a message on Jim Kershner’s voice-mail, call 459-5493. Or send e-mail to jimk@spokesman.com, or regular mail to Spokesman-Review, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jim Kershner The Spokesman-Review