Cold

You know it’s cold when you get home, and start dinner, and the butter you pull out of hte refrigerator is softer than the butter that sat on the counter all day.

I don’t often regret not having safe heating in the house, but days like today make me wish one of the 3 gas wall unit heaters or the floor furnace in the house worked. They’re so old, though, that as each broke, we were unable to find replacement parts to repair them. The library gas heater was the last to go, last winter. I’d saved enough to install some sort of new heating systemn, but then the car required every penny of the savings. Fortunately, having lived in poverty a long time, I know how to keep the house at a survivable temperature – I get it really warm while I’m home to monitor the heat sources, and with the insulating tapestries, window hangings, and closing off unneeded space, it will hold the heat throughout the night and the interior temperature never falls below 45º – the temperature the house is when I arrive home.

It takes 2 hours to raise it to a comfortable temperature.

All of this is a pain to deal with, but honestly, it’s so much better than being homeless in weather like this.

Last Saturday, none of the homeless people were in any of the places where I bring sandwiches and soup. I will go out again this Saturday, but I hope they’ve all found places in shelters.

Temperatures like this, I don’t see any reason why school gyms can’t be opened as shelters for the homeless, or churches. There are so many churches I pass that are largely unused because they will help only their own parishoners, and I find that unutterably sad.

Our Numenist Community Center is small, but we have often opened it for homeless people – from those left temporarily homeless from disasters to those who are chronically homeless but only want a single night or two indoors. If our Center were larger, we’d shelter more people – and feed them, too.

What we could do if we had a building the size of a church! A large kitchen where we could prepare food, rooms where the homeless could sleep, restrooms and showers where they could groom themselves, washers and dryers to clean their clothes, an address where they could get mail, a place to socialize and study and meditate, and land enough to grow edibles to use in the kitchen.

Modern churches are such wastes of space. It hurts my heart to see those empty buildings and know how alive and useful they could be.