My apartment windows have two panes of glass: an inner window, much like any window you’d see in Florida, and an outer window to seal out the wind and frost and all that other wintery stuff. I finally closed and locked the outer windows a few days ago, right before it first snowed. There’s something comforting and cozy about having two windows separating you from the weather outside, knowing that while it may be 20 degrees Fahrenheit on the other side of the glass, the inside of my very modest apartment is perfectly sealed off in its own insular cocoon of heat.
When I first moved to Chicago, I had no furniture, no air conditioning and all the reason in the world to stay out all day, to explore and take in the city as much as possible. My apartment was just the place where I slept at night, nothing more. Today, after running errands all afternoon, I shut myself in for the evening. I cooked a surprisingly reasonable facsimile of Chicken Marsala (facsimile in that I didn’t actually have any Marsala wine, only Merlot), brewed a big mug of hot cocoa, spread my research papers over my dinner table and had a quiet, productive night to myself in my kitchen, my apartment, my home, my warm center in a frozen city.
