The Coat

by Cynthia L. Olson

I'm convinced that the climate you are born and raised in stays with you no matter where you reside throughout your adult life. I've had friends from Wisconsin and Maine walk around the snow-filled streets of New York with a wind chill of negative 30, working up a sweat wearing only a sweater while I'm ready to visit the emergency room to see if I've developed pneumonia. Raised in the south, but dreaming since childhood of moving to New York, I thought I might be forced to accept defeat and give away my flannel blankets for a return to the gentle winters below the Mason-Dixon line. This was before I discovered my secret weapon.

When wearing the coat itself I resemble the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, or perhaps the Pillsbury Dough Boy without the hat. This is how I know I've entered a new realm--that of a woman choosing comfort over appearance. Being made androgynous by the padding of thick quilted down covering me from below my chin to just above my ankles would never have been an option five years ago, or even three, when I first thought I could battle the New York winters with a simple wool coat and a homemade hat and scarf. In fact I did survive three harsh seasons with those form-fitting coats, though just barely and not at all happily.

I had noticed women walking about in various styles of puffy coats, but always saw them as weak, or perhaps seeking a return to the comforting anonymity of childhood, somehow in the same category as adults who use scooters to get around town, rather than walk and use the subway like the rest of us. Then last winter, a co-worker showed up after Christmas wearing a full-length black quilted number and, likely tired of hearing me complain about the weather, forced me to try it on and walk outside. This was when I realized how foolish I had been. The wearers of these coats were far from cowardly or pedomorphic; they were moving about in a state of insulated bliss, likely thinking how stupid and vain the rest of us must be.

Other people's lives are altered by major, seismic events: birth and death, defeat and triumph, falling in love, having their hearts broken. Mine is more commonly shifted by everyday objects and seemingly imperceptible events, so subtle on the surface that I frequently don't notice anything has happened until days, weeks, or even years afterward. The initial result of the purchase of the coat was immediate--I no longer understood why geese needed to fly south for the winter. The coat provided such impenetrable warmth I could potentially walk about in a blizzard wearing nothing but a bikini underneath. However I wouldn't understand its full impact until several months afterward, when the weather had turned mild again and the decision to renew my lease came up. Prior to the purchase of the coat, I'd felt a light frost slowly accumulating around me with each year spent in this cold climate. The unhappy prospect of braving the wind tunnel streets was countered with the equally unattractive prospect of staying inside a cramped apartment with a manic depressive roommate. This was no way to live. This was not the New York I had imagined as a child, the gleaming city of possibility I had watched in On the Town, Hello Dolly, and Sesame Street. My dream vision for my life, however fiction-based it may have been initially, was finally rescued by a coat that helped me in starting a new reality.

I ditched the unhappy roommate and was no longer weighed down by worries of coming home to find this practical stranger sitting silently in a darkened living room, watching reruns of Antiques Roadshow. All of the slight dissatisfactions of my life seemed to be raising their voices and making themselves heard in a chorus moving me out of years of inaction, needless self-sacrifice, and manufactured indifference. If my whole life could change so dramatically with the purchase of a goose-down coat, just think what would happen when I retired my collection of four-inch heels.