Tales of the Hopelessly Homeschooled: Sample Chapters

Freezing At 85 Degrees

by Rachel

One day in June I walked two miles, came home, vacuumed, and did stomach crunches for 10 minutes. I opened every window in the house and went to get myself a drink of water. When I came back to the living room, Deborah was standing there in a jogging suit, slamming the windows down. “It’s freezing in here.”

God is a perfect planner. He knew people would be lonely, so He put us in families. He knew we’d need to learn the virtue of compromise, so He set each person’s internal thermostat differently.

It’s not as though we’re programmed according to our environments. If this were true, all people in a given location would be hot or cold at the same time, and there would be no reason to fight over the controls on the air conditioner. This is obviously not the case. Polar bears, seals, and naked mole rats are suited to their environments. People are not.

Nor is the hot/cold factor passed on through the genes. I know this for a fact, because Deborah and I have the same two parents (count them: two) and the same four grandparents and the same blue eyes, but we will never ever be comfortable at the same time.

I sleep with my windows open in January. She sleeps under three quilts in July. Someday when we have our own households I’ll need special equipment to visit her: a water squirter, heat-stroke medication, and maybe a dromedary.

I don’t blame Deborah. It’s not her fault. It’s just that her internal thermometer thinks 85 degrees Fahrenheit is freezing, and mine thinks the Yukon looks like a nice place to spend Christmas vacation.

We’re not the only ones in the family who have this problem. When Mom and I go for walks together, she dresses in everything except her bedding. Mom is very thin-blooded. Dad, on the other hand, gets hot and sweaty if he does anything as strenuous as, say, starting the car or talking on his cell phone.

Judging from conversations overheard, read, and participated in, I gather that thermostatic incompatibility is a prerequisite for marriage. I’ve never heard of a couple who agreed on what temperature the house should be kept at or how many blankets should be piled on their bed. (If you’ve noticed that one of your parents sleeps in a t-shirt while the other one sleeps in a fur-lined parka, you know what I mean.)

Dad’s not even consistent in himself. He dislikes living in Canada because it’s too cold. The desert he likes—he stays inside all day and cranks up the air conditioning until his children have icicles hanging off the ends of their noses.

Recently I read an article about clothing with personal heating and cooling systems woven into the cloth. This may be the wave of the future, but I wonder whether we really need it. Our skill at compromising may be undermined if we can control our environments to that extent. “That which does not kill me makes me stronger,” or so the wise men say. Like most things in a family of any size, temperature discrepancies are one more opportunity for building character.

Thus I say, long live compromise, long live character, and let’s please turn down the thermostat.

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