We knew of people who had a heater. These fairy tales were always some people somewhere who owned a house, and they had always lived in it. They lived there before, they continued to live there, it was always theirs, there was a permanence that rooted them to the community, to the places around them, to their ways and to their family traditions. And those kinds of people, they; not us, they would have a heater.
This heater would be stored in some area of their home, or maybe it was a part of their living room and bedrooms, or it was even installed under their luxury tile that was polished and shone in the summertime, its shiny coolness not giving away its duality and perfect function for the cold months ahead.
Those people had warm beds, piles of blankets, more than one pillow. They also wore huge oversized coats, to go over their school blazers in the car for early in the mornings, or they had hidden soft vests under their school shirts, a secret defiance to the cold, that only they knew about or that we saw when they changed in the locker rooms before P.E.
We had a polar vortex in the US two weeks ago, it even affected Texas. We were suddenly plunged into these arctic temperatures, the wind moved sideways laden with frosty particles, you could physically see the depth of the cold when you opened up the door: looked like sideways moving fronds of frozen fog close to the ground.
Inside this house we had a heater. It is a central heater, attached to a thermostat, a subconscious useful tool that automates the comfort of your home, lest you feel suddenly chilled after your shower, that level of appropriate warmth is already preselected and purchased. The point is to ward off any recollection to when the cold made you feel less than.
Despite all the movement away from where we began, and those people that we were, and the people that we vowed to now become; all it took was a dip in the atmospheric temperatures for the recollection of how things actually were when we were children to sashay into my consciousness, so that I may be partially having a conversation with my husband now before me, but viscerally, internally, my throat is clenched by this suffocating feeling of despair and desperation that we felt as children in our household in the winter.
When I was younger, I would say about 7 or 8, before my brother was born, we had bunk beds. I remember my mom allowed me to make a sandwich with a large fluffy blanket folded and then I would have a layer beneath me and a layer on top, and then my duvet. This was when things were not as desperate. We had full terry cloth (not fleece, we didn't really have fleece anything in South Africa) long sleeved and long legged pajamas when we were little. Mom was into sewing and she made our curtains and duvets and she depicted a girl with a bonnet on her head in brown with tiny flowers. I later on identified her on Facebook as Holly Hobby. We had no idea who she was, but our mom expertly appliqued her to our belongings in our bedroom.
There were hints of being threadbare, for example one memory is how mom had to start her brown Toyota Corolla. She had a piece of metal inside of a cloth and she opened the bonnet of the car and pressed something to start the car. I have no idea what she was doing. She would often cry and say she wished she had her parents because life was so hard all on her own.
Later on is when the desperation really sank in. Maybe it had always been there, but my awareness of it kicked in. My brother was born when I was 9 and by the time I was 11, mom worked nights and we had this giant toddler baby who wouldn't sleep without being rocked and sang to and shushed. He fought sleep and we fought to get him to sleep. I would wake first to make sure that I could get to school on time. But we were often late, mom barely coming back from her shift at the hospital, and dad having to drive us far to get to school in the slow morning traffic.
If you were late you had to walk through the front office and I knew that dad hadn't paid the school fees. I just wanted to crawl under a rock and hide there. I felt like everyone knew that we hadn't the money and didn't deserve to be there.
There are now what I realize are normal purchases that a family needs to make to ensure cleanliness and comfort of the family. Those purchases include sheets, pillows, blankets. As a mom of two teens, I am bereft if I see their rooms in a mess or if I see a pillow without a pillow case on it, or if I see my child is cold. I can 100% ensure you, that there were no $8 fleece blankets from Walmart given to us a gifts when we were children. There were no new pillows being bought. A pillow was almost something you had to scrounge up as we all had one, at the most two, flat, old and definitely dirty pillows. That was it. The linens were washed and ironed so many times that our feet went through the bottom of the sheets.
And then one day, my dad and I want to say my brother, when he was younger, (because we all hopped into my parents' bed to keep warm or for a snuggle after we hadn't seen my mom for 14+ hours consistently as she worked so frequently, put their feet through the bottom of a bright orange and threadbare thermal blanket that had been the mainstay of our families existence.
This blanket in tatters just tore my heart into a thousand shreds. It was butternut yellow, and in many ways the frayed fronds of blanket were like the fibers of a gourd as you scrape out its seeds and pith. I felt scraped and shredded, and useless, and beyond repair, the same state as the blanket. Mom said the blanket was from her Harare days, that is how old it was, but it was the only additional source of warmth tucked into their tiny full sized marriage bed, underneath their empty down duvet (it used to be full in 1977 when they got married, but fast forward 20+ years and it too was on its' last legs).
So given our climate, of not being able to afford basic things that bring us warmth, we did not have a heater. I knew of people who had a heater, but my dad had always told us stories of how dangerous they are. One entire family had been killed in Northwold when their gas heater exploded and because of the burglar bars on their windows, they could not escape.
I think because of these stories, and these feelings, I can not stand to walk into a house where the heat is just on because it is 65 degrees outside. I can not stand to be a part of artificial heating without the severe cognitive onslaught that should be considered before you put your heat on. Prior to wanting to feel warm, I have to question myself "am I really cold?", "could a blanket suffice?", "are you just being a sissy?", "did you check the weather in Fahrenheit and in Celsius just to make sure that it truly is a cold temperature and you're not just trying to willy-nilly waste the energy that you will have to pay for because nothing is free and you can not waste money because it is a cardinal sin and your mother lived without heat, so should you?".
The electric automated furnace clicks on and I am bereft, I am panic stricken by feelings that I am doing something wrong, just by having heat. I have similar issues with running a lot of water in a bath or hearing the shower running for an extended period, I get a lump in my throat and my pulse races. I also do not know how to dress, or what to buy because I am ill prepared for the cold, so then over compensate in ways that I don't quite understand. For instance, I have beautiful cotton vests in my drawer that I will never wear, because I do not like the feeling of them against my skin. But I own them. They are there and they are mine. As if somehow by owning them I will be absolved of being one of those worthless cold children whose story doesn't even really matter because Johannesburg doesn't really get that cold.
