Escalation

I have nearly always lived in old houses and old apartments.  Now that I'm dating an engineer with a love of big overblown shiny new houses, I'm grudgingly coming to admit that there's something to be said for dishwashers and central air and windows that don't leak frigid air every winter.  Especially the windows.  I seal mine in plastic every winter and it's always a big ordeal, and then I spend the season feeling vaguely like I'm living in a sandwich bag.

But it saves about a hundred dollars a month on heating bills, and I do like being warm.  Until Williams' "sluggish dazed spring approaches," barely discernible from winter, but nonetheless with a rich flush of warmth under the thin sharpness of the air -- air that rushes through your being reinvigorating your winter zombie animation.  For me, that invigoration builds subtly, until it suddenly erupts into a crazed starvation for fresh nighttime air blowing into my bedroom, usually at midnight on a worknight when I should be sleeping but am overcome with the conviction that if I don't get the windows open RIGHT FUCKING NOW I will swelter and suffocate, and it's either rip the plastic off the windows or tear my way out of my own skin.

This moment finally happened, when I knew I could not breathe the stale close air in my bedroom one more night without losing the dubious remnants of my sanity, and I clawed the plastic off the windows and triumphantly threw up the sash...and was thwarted by the ancient storm windows having swollen shut.  Thus, midnight on a work night found me kneeling naked in the window yanking madly at the aluminum tabs with a hammer and a screwdriver, alternately pushing up and pulling down the upper and lower windows with sweat pouring down my back and every sense narrowed to the focus on my life's great work, my only purpose in being: getting the goddamn window open.

And victory, in the end, was mine.  I sat back on my heels and felt the sweet cold of early spring pour over my skin and into the stuffy room, sweeping out the cloying staleness with every surge of breeze.

But in the quest for freedom there was a collateral casualty.  As I pulled down the upper window to try to see if anything was jammed, I recoiled from a stink bug balanced along the top beam.  I was startled, annoyed, sweaty and desperate, so that when I ascertained that nothing was in fact jammed, I pushed the window right back up and ignored the crunch.

Oh dear.  Sorry, little buddy.