Life with Wool: Only Bad Clothing

Greetings from Maine. We had a beautiful white Christmas for the first time in years. But on New Year’s Eve, Mother Nature decided to erase her masterpiece.

The next morning, we awoke to a balmy world of mud and grass. We celebrated the new year with coffee on the porch, something so unthinkable for this time of year, we didn’t even have chairs to sit on.

A day later the cold swept back in and froze everything solid. Winters in New England are becoming less like a Grimms’ fairy tale and more like a rollercoaster these days. But January is when things really start to get cold.

Maine has many things going for it—the beautiful coastline, star-filled nighttime skies, delicious blueberries, abundant seafood, just to name a few. But what seems to stick in people’s minds most is the winters.

That’s the first thing people ask about when they find out I live in Maine, rather like I always ask Floridians about their alligator situation.

When we first moved here, old-timers tried to scare us with stories of how bad the winters could get. They spoke of running ropes from the house to the barn to keep from getting lost in a blizzard. They told us how the bay froze thick enough for them to drive their trucks across it to Deer Isle, a distance of just over a mile. They spoke of snow drifts so high the family had to use an upstairs window to get in and out of the house.

Their memories were as recent as the early 1970s, when many people here didn’t even have central heating. There would be a stove downstairs that was stoked all winter long, which meant your kitchen was always 90 degrees while the rest of the house got progressively colder until your water glass on the bedside table froze overnight.

To navigate the shift from extreme outdoors to extreme indoors, people engaged in the delicate art of bundling up. They wore heavy wool coats and heavy wool sweaters and heavy wool turtlenecks and heavy wool trousers and heavy wool socks and scarves and hats and mittens and beneath it all they relied on the same pair of heavy wool long johns to keep them going from November to April.

Today, we get to luxuriate in our insulated houses with their energy-efficient windows and central heating controlled by thermostats that are getting so sophisticated, I half expect mine to start texting me when a storm is on the way.

But as much as things have changed, we still bundle up when we head outside.

And head outside we must!

For as much as I want to scare you with stories of frostbitten fingertips and icicles growing from one’s nose hairs, the truth is that the coldest days are the most glorious of all. (And frozen nose hairs tickle, which is kind of fun.) But you must go outside to experience them.

Stay inside and you’ll quickly build up an adversarial relationship with the winter. It’s far better to bundle up like a bird in its puffer jacket and make friends with the cold. The more you engage with winter, the more you see, the less daunting it all seems, and the better you feel.

It all comes down to layers. Oh sure, it may be warm and beautiful in places like Hawaii and Arizona. But you can only remove so many layers to cool down before someone calls the police. And even if you did strip naked, you’d still be hot.

You can, however, dress for warmth, simply adding and subtracting layers like you’d adjust a thermostat. I once counted 16 items of clothing during one particularly cold winter walk, nearly all of which, from underwear to insoles, contained some amount of wool.

Forget the high-tech high-performance outdoor fibers fabricated in a far-off laboratory, I’ll take a sheep’s coat any day. And in the end, wool’s ease at riding out extremes may be its greatest gift, especially as our climate slips deeper into extremes.

Properly bundled, you’ll be fine in a Maine winter. Seriously fine. More than fine. Fine enough, even, to drive your truck across a mile of ice and still get home in time to go sledding off your roof.

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