The Ghost Who Came in from the Cold

Mischief and mayhem on a January night.

Jan 15, 2025

**Andrew Wyeth, The Revenant (detail). 1949**

I don’t buy toys.

Let me clarify: I don’t buy those toys. Not for me, or anyone else. Never have. I mean, why? What do people even do with them, other than hide them— hahaha, good one — from the kids?

That is not to say that I don’t have a special drawer in my dresser. But there isn’t a single thing in it that I purchased for myself. I didn’t need to. Over the forty-three years of our marriage, my husband invented occasions. With these, and the you’d-better-not-forget ones (Valentine’s, anniversary, birthday) the drawer overflowed. It colonized other drawers. Satins and silks, too slippery to organize into neat piles, fell in with a rough crowd of socks and T-shirts. A couple of wire baskets in the closet took in their share of orphaned camisoles —

TMI, I know. Sorry.

I’m only telling you this because I live in Minnesota, it’s January, and my December heating bill just arrived. I had to look at it twice, thinking I know I paid for November, why are they billing me for two months? It turned out that I had paid the November bill. The number in front of me was the amount I owed for the last thirty-one days of 2024. Even without baking a single cookie or wrapping the eaves in lights, I’d been hit by a sleigh load of kilowatt hours.

It was time to turn down the heat and dig out the flannel pajamas. All of the pretty lingerie had to make way for long sleeves and sweatpants. Only three days in, the year was running up a big tab. January would be sobering.

I hadn’t gone through my clothes since his death in April, 2023. Why bother with the mental exertion of sorting — that anguished triage trivialized as tidying — when all I needed was something comfortable, appropriate, with no visible holes, that didn’t broadcast a long-past decade like a whiff of strong perfume?

But it was time. I pulled out some slippers and a pair of fleece leggings. I dug around, reached into the corners. Just a few things to keep me cozy at night —

Oh.

Reader, this was not the kind of warmth I had in mind.

Our house was built in 1913. It’s a Craftsman, with box-beamed ceilings and boatloads of charm. It has the idiosyncrasies of century-old homes, requiring maintenance specific to their needs. R-values? Tuckpointing? Weatherstripping? My husband was the one responsible for keeping the heat in and the cold out. He bled radiators and sealed thresholds, caulked crevices, tracked drafts to their sources and sealed them.

He did those things; I didn’t need to. Like the caretaker to a cantankerous old relative, he knew our home’s quirks, its preferences and refusals. Time to clean the gutters? Fertilize the azaleas? He was on it. I wasn’t. I didn’t have to be.

When we bought the place in 1986, we’d already renovated one house. It had taken us seven years to undo the remuddling committed by the previous owners. Our sweat equity raised its value enough that we could afford to sell it and move on to the next fixer-upper.

We were convinced we could handle anything. The only reason for the move was that we’d had a child. Our little jewel box shrank to half its useful size as we tripped over baby gear. Between indulgent grandparents, a doting dad, and an anxious mom who let her daughter wail in her crib as she finished smocking the Easter dress, but nevertheless filled bookshelves with parenting bibles, we were crowded out.

Buy the worst house in the best neighborhood you can afford, was the wisdom of the time. A fifteen-minute tour convinced us. It had my two dream features, a bay window and fireplace. We saw nothing but potential under multiple layers of paint. Not even eggplant or Kelly green — two of our three bedrooms were the color of sweaters — deterred us. And the neighborhood: not wealthy, but well-educated, with generous values and a reputation for civic involvement. And stable. Houses rarely came on the market, and were often sold before the sign went up.

We signed the purchase agreement in April, and moved in the following July. Nothing could have prepared us.

Toilet and sink installed behind the door to the basement? Oak floors stained dark with dog pee under the avocado-green carpet? Water pressure so bad that taking a shower meant leaning against the tile as a thin, tepid stream trickled down the wall? How could we not have noticed?

I have no pictures from those days, and few words to describe the long silent nights, next to each other in bed, staring into the void, ready to murder someone.

I don’t know if the inspector who signed off on the place was visually, emotionally, or ethically impaired. Our first winter was unusually mild. Carbon monoxide trapped behind the caved-in flue found an escape through the cracked foundation and a couple of broken windows. We knew none of this until the following spring, when we had the ancient boiler replaced.

“How long will it last?” my husband asked the guy who installed it.

He tilted his head. Squinted at the shiny hearth, the beating new heart of our old house.

“Can’t say. Ten years, or thirty-five. It may die young, or live forever. But probably won’t kill you.”

He picked up his tool box. Ran his hand over a bit of dust, wiping the enamel clean.

“Not like that other one. You must have a guardian angel.”

Our daughter was two. I hugged her tight, as her dad installed smoke alarms and CO detectors.

Before he left us, my husband reclaimed the house and transformed it. Someday I’ll give you a tour. He honored his vision and turned it into a place where people walk in, gasp, and say, This is beautiful. And it is.

I’m alone. No: I’m a widow with a cat who’s far exceeded her nine lives. I wander the rooms, moving things or leaving them where they are, cleaning only when I expect company, talking to myself, staying indoors for days. I’m afraid to start ordering groceries because I know it will become a habit. Too easy to feed my panic attacks; they’ll harden into agoraphobia if I don’t get out. I take walks. Talk to people. Meet friends for coffee or lunch, art fairs or cultural events. Dancing: ballroom or folk, though I’m terrible at both.

Between Zooms and phone calls and online classes, I have more than enough to keep me busy. I meet my neighbors on Saturday mornings. Maybe I’ll start going to church.

My children and daughter-in-law come for dinner. They play cards and games with intricate rules. I cook them dinner, doubling quantities to send them home with leftovers. Nothing makes me happier. I’m doing okay.

Except when I’m not.

Grief does that.

Ushering in the year, temperatures fell to single digits, hovered, then dropped below zero. Lying in bed under a sheet, two blankets, bedspread, and duvet, wearing my husband’s long underwear, I was almost comfortable. Books scattered around me, face-down. Underlining, making notes in the margins, it felt like graduate school again. I reached for a journal to write down a thought —

The walls started to shake. Rhythmic, like a jackhammer. Loud. Louder. Where was it coming from? Everywhere, it seemed. Was it a home invasion? The Rapture?

The boiler?

It was — it sounded — ready to explode. What else could it be? Furious at my neglect, my tiptoeing past it on the way to the washing machine, never paying a visit.

Lately, it had begun to rattle. kicking on with a whoosh, the flame a burner set on high. I should have had it serviced in the fall. I should have done a lot of things in the fall. Alone in the house, noises escalated during the day, settling into a low menace at night.

But this.

The walls, pictures, the bed, the furniture were all shaking. Even the adjacent bedroom, where I still kept my husband’s laptop and iPads and a bunch of random printers and hard drives, was resonating. It was 2025. Was this a new Y2K bug, a sleeper variant of the original? Mutated, deadly, artificial intelligence about to exterminate the human race?

I stood up and pulled on my robe.

WHO CAN I CALL AM I GOING TO DIE WHAT’S HAPPENING? My mind raced like chyrons on Fox News. Blazing, apocalyptic. I reached for my phone. Police, ambulance, bomb squad, guy next door who’s an engineer, my son —

Wait.

Was it the dresser? The special drawer?

Reader, it was.

I reached in and found the culprit. A basic model, no frills, twisting open from the bottom like a Chapstick into a compartment with a tiny brass spring and two AA batteries. I disarmed it. The Apocalypse was merely a rehearsal. The Titan missile was neutralized.

On its long — but not too long — bullet-shaped white form were the words: Iconic Smoothie.

I stood there, doubled over, gasping. I don’t believe I‘ve ever laughed so hard in my entire life.

Brushing back tears, I said Hahaha, good one to the miscreant ghost who’d managed to hide it until the time I needed it. Just not in the way you might think.

The Ghost Who Came in from the Cold

Mischief and mayhem on a January night.

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