Autumn Limbo

Hearing the hum and puff of the furnace in my mom's house for the first time in about a year has finally made it solidly clear to me that I am home. My mother said to me as she showed my her new back-up kerosene heater, "It's a hard life we live."
I am no longer on the run in the tropics nor any other part of the world than western Pennsylvania; I am a captive now of the rain and the chill that has sunk into the little bones of my feet and hands and into the cartilage of my nose and ears.
A trip I've planned to Wisconsin in two weeks isn't going to help too much in that department, I don't think. It will be most excellent to get away for a long weekend, especially for my birthday and especially into the warm, solid arms of the man I love who unfortunately lives out there.
In the meantime, I've got about ten days of peace here in my mother's home while my sister and her boyfriend are vacationing for a wedding in North Carolina. My sister sent me a picture message of a sand dune they drove past, and I was instantly envious of the blue sky that was shamelessly illuminated by a bright sun that seems to have forsaken us Pennsylvanians, at least for now. About eight months ago, I was the one sending pictures of sunshine and sand and my minimally clothed, tanned body home to my family while they were staying up all night to keep a fire going in the wood burning stove that my dad had gotten for the house the winter before Y2K.
In case you have forgotten, or have pushed that particular winter out of your mind, our society which takes pride in being sophisticated and logical and scientific went all but crazy thinking that some grand computer-driven catastrophe would hit us and knock the world back into the 1890s. Yes, my father was among those that simply wanted to be "prepared." He got the wood burning stove in a similar manner to how he got almost anything he brought into the house: "A buddy of mine hooked me up."
It was an army-issue stove, complete with serial numbers whose meaning I had no knowledge of, rust, harsh angles and a creaking little door on the bottom half that we used to stuff paper and cardboard in and play with the flames when Dad wasn't looking.
When he moved out only a year or two later, the stove remained. No longer on the lovely cinder blocks in the middle of our otherwise cozy living room, it sat in the basement where my mother kept its fires fed to keep the heating bills as low as she possibly could. While I was away, probably on a beach somewhere in Costa Rica or Nicaragua, my family ran out of oil to run the furnace. It's expensive, and my mom got caught up in paying the rest of her bills when she had bought the oil for the entire winter and spent as little as possible while oil was well over $100/ barrel.
I called home to see how everything was, or to tell them how I was, and I led off with, "I am so burnt it hurts to just lay in the hammock on my balcony between classes."
My sister told me, "It's under 10 degrees here and the furnace isn't working."
What an asshole. What was I supposed to say then? "Nevermind, it sucks here?"
This winter I am going to spend between Pennsylvania and its even more frigid counterpart, Wisconsin. And I am going to look at my photos from last winter and dream of escaping to Costa Rica with the man I met there.
But I will be sleeping in the bed next to my mother's room, trying to make a little money tutoring and to get my ass out of college so that I can get a job. A real one that will heat my home and make that furnace hum.