Love You Like A Month of Sundays

“Because I love Glasgow – even when it rains for a week straight, even when it smells like Tennent’s, even when I have to step around vomit on the street on a Saturday morning. I enjoy New York, I admire New York, but I don’t love it. “

Glasgow. New York. California. Home. There’s no place like it.

Almost a year ago, we discovered the delightful blog of a fellow expatriate, K. from “Long-Ayeland” and recently were both touched and amused by her words as she prepared to visit family and friends in the United States.

“Man, is she better adjusted that we are,” D&T mused to themselves, forgetting that K. as a New Yorker, is more accustomed to big city life and has been here for three years to our one year and five months. She travels frequently and has been all over Scotland and beyond. Our lives – our daily schedules – our reasons for being here – are totally different.

Still, there is a shade of wistfulness in us when we read K’s posts. When K. leaves, the green land says, “Haste ye back!” Neither the gray city streets nor the green breath of Caledonia’s countryside wishes us back when we’ve gone.

Never mind. As we rode home from the airport, watching the hedgerows flash past in their precisely clipped flatness, we vowed to carve out a little section of Scotland that welcomed us, too. And so we begin today with our brief love letters to the green land, *thirty random Sundays worth.

“You’re going to freeze to death.” It was said with certainty, and a certain amount of schadenfreude-esque relish, by several people as we left the warmth of autumn on the West Coast, and entered the mercurial dampness of a Scottish September.

“No, you’re not,” other friends who had gone to school in the UK assured us staunchly. “Don’t worry about the cold. Use the radiators.”

Growing up in California, neither D nor T had much experience in terms of bitter cold. The occasional morning dressing in front of the heater or the pellet stove for T. was the antidote to nippy, drippy Northern California fog, while D.’s Southern California childhood just supplied a sweatshirt for those once-a-decade times when winter temperatures dropped below the fifties. Cold weather wasn’t one of the things we worried about — and being in the rain without a car just meant we’d carry an umbrella. We were sure everything would be fine. We hadn’t counted on narrow sidewalks which made umbrella usage dangerous, on monsoon deluges, potholed streets filled with speeding cars, cyclone winds and faucets of rain that gushed steadily, moodily, sullenly, sometimes not letting up for days on end.

One day, shivering violently in sodden shoes with runnels of water dripping from our hair, we stumbled home, slammed the door and stood, goosepimpled and disconsolate, soaked to the skin in our dim, damp apartment. “We’re going to freeze to death,” we mourned with chattering teeth.

Except, we didn’t.

Socks, we discovered, dried quickly, when draped over radiators. Ditto for laundry, which was a happy discovery, since we never did figure out how to make the all-in-one washer/dryer ever actually dry, and were worried by how long it took laundry to dry — and how much dampness it added to an already humid and mildewing house. Happy hours of sitting in our rocker/recliner, feet propped on a toasty radiator, made this rainy summer of reading and studying pass more quickly for D… But the bonus, the most fabulous bonus, was the bread.

On even the coldest days, when the temps were below freezing, we could balance our loaves on the radiators and they would raise. Our special winter radiator boon: not only do we have warm, dry feet, we have fresh, hot bread.

Life is good.

So, to our radiators, which make weird bubbling noises at night sometimes and wake us up, we acknowledge that you’re just reassuring us that you’re working. For your radiant heat, which, unlike forced heat, doesn’t blow dust into our sinuses, for your ability to singe our bums if we sit on you for too long, and for giving us lovely warm sweaters to wear — we love you like a month of Sundays. Scottish radiators, you are awesome.

– D & T

“A month of Sundays” is a British phrase (first recorded in 1832) that in hyperbole would mean a literal thirty-one days of Sunday. Previously it meant a long dreary time, since no one could play games or do anything fun on a Sunday, but is used here to indicate the very best of Sunday: lounging around in soft flannel, drinking something hot and munching on buttery toast, doing the crossword puzzle from the paper, and not bothering to do much with one’s hair.

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