Relatively Comfortable

In 2009, I moved to a town in the Midwest for a job.

What it was doesn’t really matter. What’s pertinent to today’s discussion–which is: what constitutes space-heater-worthy weather–is that, upon my arrival in August or so, some of my new coworkers told me not to get used to the hot, summery weather. I would, they assured me, have to prepare myself for a real winter with some serious snowfall. And they said this in a strange, smug way, as if to imply this would be new for me.

Mind you, I’d just moved there from my hometown in the Hudson Valley of New York. I’d gone to college in Vermont and had even lived in Chicago for about a year immediately after graduating. It wasn’t like I’d just arrived, having spent the entirety of my life to that point in Miami. I had experienced winter. In fact, the three places I’d lived before all got a good bit more snow than where I’d moved.

Making it all the more confusing: the Midwest does experience harsher winters than the Northeast in many ways beyond snowfall. Few areas of the United States can match the bitterness of the icy wind that howls across the plains. And now that I’m back here in the Midwest, I find the opposite frustration. I will come out of a week in which the daily highs do not add up to a double-digit number (unless, in some cases, that double digit number is a negative number), and when I discuss this fact with folks out east, they’ll sagely tell me it’s cold there too, even as the temperature floats luxuriously in the 20s.

And this is just comparing the weather between two places that are, ultimately, very much alike in climate.

I remember talking to a friend from the south, who told me she hated the cold but then, for some reason, decided to go to college in Tennessee. It took me almost a whole minute to realize she meant these things to be contradictory, because to her, Tennessee was a cold state. Furthermore, I remember working at a summer camp in Southern California and watching the kids show up in sweatshirts because the morning temperature had dropped to about sixty-five degrees.

But I don’t mean this to shame anyone. Rather, I seek only to point out how relative ‘comfortable’ can be as we sell a product designed to deliver exactly that: comfort. What is, for some, frigid, is for others, cold but manageable. And what some call a chilly morning, others might call the perfect temperature. And every assessment, contrary though they may be, is correct. Because comfort relies on context.

So, if you need a space heater because you converted the attic of your regal old home in Maine into an office, and hoo-boy does it get cold up there come winter time, that’s cool. And if you just want a space heater for staying cozy while you watch TV, because you live in a hot climate, but sometimes there’s a slight chill at night, and your apartment doesn’t have great heating, that’s cool too.

What’s important is that you’re happy and comfortable. And also that you spend some money on our site. That’s also really important.