Blanket- Object Writing June 10

Soft covering, sometimes scratchy sometimes itchy – like a mosquito bite from those annoying buzzing things in the night on hot summer nights where you toss and turn as the humidity weighs down on you with  gym machine weights loaded up in bricks of kilograms and pounds per square inch all pressing down on your exposed skin from which you’ve thrown the soft perfumed blanket. The sheets smell fresh and of outdoors when you go to bed, but by morning they’ve been  turned into a sponge of sweat. The only option is to go downstairs where the house is cooler, that is assuming you don’t have a cooler, somewhere up in the roof some sort of air conditioner modulates the temperature and keeps you cool in summer warm in winter at the expense of greenhouse gasses pumping into the atmosphere that make things hotter anyway- so maybe a blanket is a better way – for the benefit of the planet at least. But when it is cool, when Autumn starts to creep in, the one blanket that you’ve sufficed with all summer is added to until maybe it’s three- or you get a duvee or a doona as they’re called here. Thick white fluffy pockets of stuff that seem to   separate you from the  whispy layers of chill that start to build over the months that lead to winter. 

Winter where you sit around the glowing fire in the lounge room, sipping on cups of hot chocolate, frothy chocolate that leaves a beard of chocolate moustache on your upper lip. Your tongue travels along it and  collects it like a lawn edger, your tongue is a power saw collecting those delicious dregs. You love to go out on those winter mornings where it’s been near freezing and find puddles that have frozen over and in your gumboots you step on the glass like surface and hear it crackle and separate and it becomes like an ice skate under your foot and you struggle to keep your balance – falling backwards onto your arse and having a good laugh as your breath spouts out in clouds of  coughing laughter. All the way to wherever you’re going that wet behind reminds you and all you can think of is a nice warm fire and somewhere to wrap up your chilled behind, a nice warm fire, a blanket somewhere in your bedroom. Lying down looking out at the heavy duty battery of clouds, the grey angry faces of winter blowing there best at you from the heavens, the Gods of the clouds taunting you, but you’re safe and sound inside your parade ground, inside the warm fug of your army of blankets yep that a beautiful thing.