things

I felt chilly this morning, so I turned on the little space heater that I keep under my desk.

Usually when I turn it on, I'm in a hurry, or distracted. In the middle of a conversation with a parent, phone in one hand, I'll reach down and flip the switch to 'heat' without thinking much about it.

This morning I stopped for a minute and looked at the little heater. It's really cute; a tiny black cube that manages to blast enough heat to keep my toes toasty in this cold basement office. It has a sensor that turns it off if it falls over, a little hidden handle so you can pick it up easily, an auto/manual setting, temperature control, and a fan option, in case all you want is a little air movement.

But mostly what makes me like it is the associations it has - my friends and roommates Jodi and Angela purchased this little gem for me in 1995 with 'house funds' (which funds these were, or how we came up with them, I now don't recall). I had just moved to a huge group house (there were 6 of us, unrelated professionals, and one bathroom. Wahoo!) in Los Altos, California, and my bedroom was the back porch. Had been the back porch. I had to put up thick drapes so that people in the living room wouldn't be able to see through the huge plate-glass windows, right into my bed. The floor was concrete, covered with a hideously-fluorescent green shag rug. When it rained, everything got a bit damp. When it was cold (which happens quite often in northern California), the room was freezing. Of course, being the back porch, the furnace's heating ducts didn't reach me there. It was COLD, I tell you! (Hence the heater.)
But from my bed, I could see the two enormous live oaks in the backyard, stretching their branches up over our house. I could see the moon every night. I could hear peeper frogs and crickets. It was one of my favorite bedrooms ever.

I love it that things have that power of association. That this morning in the year 2008, I can glance down at the little black plastic square at my feet, in my basement office in Oneonta, and be instantly transported back 13 years, to recall the details of faces and spaces and times that I haven't thought about for many a moon.