Hibernation

Hibernation is a state of minimal activity and metabolic depression. Hibernation is a seasonal heterothermy characterized by low body-temperature, slow breathing and heart-rate, and low metabolic rate. It most commonly occurs during winter months.

-Wikipedia

Thirty-five and damp out there this morning, with low clouds and fog shrouding the hills.

The locals would tell you this is the warmest December they've experienced in a while. Actually, they'd probably respond to your observing that fact with a feeble nod, worried that you jinxed this extended fall by wondering out loud what became of all the snow one would expect by now. I'm told hospital folks have the same sort of superstition if you mention how quiet the emergency room seems.

But it's cold enough for this Son of the South, and all this chill is bringing on physiological and psychological changes that are palpable. First it was the extremities that once were my hands and feet. "Yikes! Your hands are freezing!" exclaimed my beloved P when I squeezed her hand as she walked through the door yesterday. The frozen hands are a constant, and even now they make typing a challenge. And having popsicles at the ends of my wrists all the time has made me able to keep the Roman Catholic ordination vow I never made, because the lovely Peg wants nowhere near the icy touch. No one ever accused the Winter Warlock of being particularly sexy.

Then came the lack of motivation to do much of anything. Gym plans, meticulous checklists of all the stuff I expect to accomplish at work each day--all of it falls away as the morning wears on, until I'm a 57-year-old man sitting in his pajamas at two in the afternoon trying to muster the motivation to bathe and dress so P doesn't realize what a sluggo I've become.

I don't have to tell you another symptom of this wintertide malaise is muddy-headed thought. You're reading this, after all. Res ipsa loquitur.

Now the pathology has drifted to what was once my sleep cycle. I still indulge myself in the usual tossing-and-turning between around two and four every night, in what has turned into the busiest time of mental activity I have all day. Then I forget what I was going to do about all those worries by the time the alarm demands I roll out of bed to make P a cup of coffee and feed the cats.

The tell at that predawn moment is my failure to join her with my own cup of coffee. Why? The Donkster has given up on any sort of morning routine, and once I've shooed P out the door I sprawl on the couch reading the Times on my tablet until, well, the inevitable happens and I've slipped into the Land of Nod, in the Swiftian and not the Biblical sense of the phrase. Dead ass asleep, as we'd say in our house.

This morning I didn't budge until 8:21. 8:21! Can you imagine? And it was a battle to throw off the blanket and sit up even then, with this insipid Yankee sunlight outside and a work calendar populated with absolutely nothing. And, of course, the cold, the constant cold.

I find myself wondering, were I to send in one of those Ancestry.com cheek swabs, if the helpful geneticist would return a report that's one percent Genghis Khan (because we all are descendants of that rapey spree across Europe, I'm told), seventy percent Irish, and the rest black bear. Because I get the whole bear thing now, this earth-evolved body's urge just to crawl someplace warm and sleep through those cold, dreary weeks until pitchers and catchers report for the Braves training camp sometime in late February.

But I have a pile of to-dos as high as my ceiling between now and then, so probably best that we're flying home to Florida tomorrow, weather permitting. A few weeks of warmth and human interaction will likely do me some good. Of course, it'll probably also get me Omicron, but let's face it--we're all going to get Omicron, so why sweat it? Peg's planning to prime the social pump tonight by dragging me to the Corning Country Club end of year party after she gets off work. They close tomorrow and don't reopen until late February. Even golfers up here succumb to the urge to hibernate, it seems.