Last Friday I woke before my alarm, sometime around 6:30am. I lay there for awhile, cocooned under my comforter, thinking 'bout stuff. After a little while I heard a quiet hissing, coming from the far corner of my room.
Our heat had come on.
In most New York apartments, you don't control your heat. Your landlord does. They decide when to turn it on / off for the whole building (although there are regulations to keep them in check), and they decide what level of warmth to blast through your radiators.
Some landlords are stingy with the heat (as was the case at my Brooklyn abode), while some seem to think they're operating a sauna (as was the case at my last apartment, where we had to crack windows in January).
I'm not sure yet how my current building will fare in this radiator season, but that's not the point. The point? Just that it IS radiator season now. As of Friday morning, the heat is on. This time has come. Again.
I'm not sure I can explain why I was so excited about this realization last Friday morning. I do like cold weather, it's true, but I don't love the dry, dry radiator heat. Plus, when the heat kicks on I can no longer use the radiator as a shelf. Where am I going to stack my mail now!?
No, my excitement was not tied so much to the hissing radiator, as to the threshold that it represented. The moving from one season to the next. From old to new.
Except not exactly new - right? This happens every year. Every year the heat turns on. I think part of my excitement was just thankfulness that we had reached this season again, that time keeps on moving, that life keeps on moving, that we can't get stuck in one season forever.
We move forward. We come to thresholds and we face changes (some good, some bad) and we keep moving. "The only constant is change," and sometimes that is a comfort. It was last Friday, anyways.
If this post doesn't make sense to you, I'm okay with that. It doesn't make much sense to me, either. I just wanted to mark this occasion somehow, this passing of time. Happy heat season, y'all!
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