No Heat But Plenty of Gratitude

 I did notice that the furnace was cycling on and off much quicker than usual, but I didn't remark on it to anybody; I just reasoned that it must be especially cold outside. My mom, however, called the furnace doctor, and he ascertained that the gizmo that senses how cold our house is was dying–in fact, while he was here, it did die–and we were without heat. The day was almost over and he didn't have the necessary part in his truck, so he promised to order it and come back to install it as soon as it arrived.

Meanwhile, snow began to fall.

The first night, we piled blankets onto our beds and slept snugly–even a little too snugly–as the retained heat leached out of the house. The next morning my mom preheated the oven several times and, each time, opened the door to let the heat spill into the kitchen. By lunchtime, two of us were wearing fingerless gloves and all of us were joking about feeling like Dickens characters or pipe-smoking professors in our various concessions to the cold. Shortly after lunch, I added a hat to my ensemble.

Fortunately, my grandparents' apartment, which is attached to our house, is heated by a heat pump, which was still functioning, so while they ran errands in the afternoon my sister and I each took a long, deliciously scalding shower.

In the evening my mom lit a fire in our fireplace and we ate dinner in the living room, holding our hot plates on our laps.

The next afternoon the furnace doctor returned and replaced the dead sensor, restoring heat to our home.

For two days our house was without heat, and this struck us as a worrisome inconvenience, although we joked about it. But we have a house to heat, and it usually is heated, and even on the rare occasion when it isn't, we have electricity for light and space heaters and running water, and plenty of hot food to warm us up from the inside, and neighbors who possess heat and hot water! Even if our house went unheated all winter long, we'd still be incredibly blessed.