Author Archives: Patricia Wild

. . . and it’s the middle of the winter and all you want to do is get warm, who has time to research the best deal? (Twice, today, I happened to be with people in that dire situation.) So maybe that’s what I’ll do? Starting tomorrow?

So, yes, the blizzard did hit and, lo, we lost power from about 6 until 9:30 am. Since we’d been out late last night—to see “Ruined,” a brutal yet redemptive play at the Huntington—it was very easy to simply curl up next to the warm body sharing my bed (Yes. Yesterday’s blog re body heat was on my mind) and go back to sleep. Eventually, however, the wonder of the hushed, whitened world outside drew me out of bed around nine.

First challenge: How to make coffee. Happily, I discovered that I could light the hi-tech gas stove with a match. Arright! I even remembered, sleepy as I was, to add extra water to the pot so that when I heated it for coffee I was also heating the kitchen.  Slightly.

In those first few minutes of being awake, fortified by coffee and in my warmest robe, pajamas, socks and slippers, I thought: “Well, this isn’t so bad.” But with no cars on School Street, no refrigerator noise, no rattling radiators, no children walking by on their way to school; in utter, utter quiet, I could actually hear this old house start to gently creak. It was cooling down.

That’s when it hit me: This could really, really suck.

I’m not going to claim that in those, literally, chilling minutes before the power came back on and the radiators began cheerfully clunking again that I had an entire mind-meld/totally empathetic Ah HA understanding of what it feels like to be poor and cold and helpless.

But I was pretty close.

An old New England expression, buttonin’ up means preparing for winter: Putting up the storms, stacking the fire wood close to the house, checking food supplies, candles, lanterns, etc. Another winter storm approaching, I find myself caulking a few more windows and—locating my seldom-used cross-country skis. Yup. This storm, I’m gonna do a little skiin’.

I grew up skiing, or so it seems, old-style skiing, “baggy knees skiing.” When the sport got way too chichi for old-style me, I quit. But was delighted in the early 70s to discover cross-country skiing. Definitely a good fit.

So tomorrow I’ll be generating another form of heat as I glide over snowy sidewalks for a spell (I’m still not used to that dull thud when my ski poles hit asphalt or concrete.). I’ll be buttonin’ up my body to go outside, then, after a few vigorous, cardiovascular minutes, unzipping my jacket, removing my scarf.

Sunday night, when the group of people I was with visited the JP Green House, we collectively caused the temperature of that super-insulated home to go up 2 degrees.

Body heat. Hmm.

Today’s Boston Globe had a disturbing article in the business section: Evergreen Solar, a local biz, “has struggled against aggressive competition in China, a poor economy, and increasingly lackluster government support for the country’s solar industry.”

This is, of course, outrageous.

And worthy of a mini-rant. Are you ready? Here goes:

[Historical reference: In the sixties and seventies, many a rant began: “We can put a man on the moon but we can’t . . . ]

We can spend billions of dollars on war but we can’t support subsidize companies like Evergreen? (China, on the other hand has “ramped up manufacturing, using massive government subsidies to produce the world’s cheapest solar panels.”)

This is outrageous.

Here’s how I plan to cope with my outrage and my sense of powerlessness; I share this because it’s helpful.

When I read maddening articles like this in my morning paper, I remind myself that I’m reading, you know, The Boston Globe. Does the Globe know much about the countless visionary individuals and small neighborhood efforts and initiatives and small businesses who, indeed, recognize what’s imperative? Like Slow Money for example?

What do you think?

And I am comforted by the very last words of George Eliot’s Middlemarch—which I just finished last night.

Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Yesterday, in the spirit of Telling Everybody What I’m Doing and Then Listening, my friend Betsy  mentioned her visit to Finland. She’d noticed that the streets were all torn up and had been told that Finland was doing interesting things to reduce their oil imports.

Hmm. Finland. Where it get’s to minus 20 Celsius. So this morning, googled “Finland heating” and came up with a slew of interesting things happening in Finland.

For starters:

1. Recycling excess heat from a large data center—to heat adjacent buildings and homes, I’m guessing.

2. Heating businesses producing heat for local district heating systems. Shared heat.

Both projects, especially the second, required commitment and enormous capital. Could this country, so financially strapped by the wars in—well, it’s just too damned depressing to name them all—turn on a dime, like it did when the US became a mighty war machine, and invest its enormous resources towards projects such as are happening in Finland?

Of course we can.

Why do I say that?

Because I believe in That of God in everyone.

Because I believe in transformation.

Because I am “practic[ing] resurrection.”

And because I don’t think it’s a coincidence that one of the greatest anti-war songs is, you guessed, “Finlandia.”