It is official: stay-in-bed weather has returned.
This year, it arrived a week ago Thursday. I know this because it was dark when the alarm summoned me out of slumber. The rain was hitting the windows sideways. The house felt like an icebox.
Sadly, the alarm always summons me out of slumber during stay-in-bed weather. Stay-in-bed weather never, in fact, seems to arrive on a day when I can stay in bed, or at least, in my nightgown. It arrives when I have to rise before dawn, perform the shower routine and run to the bus.
"Man," I said to a colleague when I arrived at work. The sky was still black. My umbrella was dripping and my feet were soaked. "This sure is a stay-in-bed day."
The colleague nodded, and looked at me sadly.
"If only," he said. If only, indeed. If only we knew that stay-in-bed weather would last a day or two, or a couple of fortnights, max.
We know differently. Stay-in-bed weather, of course, will be with us for months - at least, for those of us unable to winter in Puerto Vallarta.
In an ideal world, I would do what people ought to do during stay-in-bed weather.
I would brew a pot of coffee, find myself a novel and a bagel and jam, and stay beneath the covers. I would crank up the heat and disregard the sideways rain and rise only to brush my teeth.
I would do some Sudoku, and perhaps a bit of mending. I would paint my nails, and fill my sketchbook. I would consult recipe books and plot menus.
I would have a cat at my feet and a phone at my side. I would spend two hours on the telephone, calling sisters and girlfriends, all of whom would be painting their nails and sipping their coffee and snuggling beneath their duvets.
"What are you doing today?" I would inquire of a girlfriend.
"Staying in bed," the girlfriend would reply. "I phoned the office and said I wouldn't be in on account of the weather."
"Well, that's a given," I'd say. "But what beyond that?"
"Oh, you know," she might say. "Just filling some photo albums and writing some letters and reading some old magazines. And snoozing, of course. The usual stuff on stay-in-bed days."
In an ideal world, our employers would understand when we called and told them we might not return until the rain stopped or spring arrived - whichever came first.
Granted, the sleep-in will cause us some woes. But I promise I'll get up, come March.
