Peter McKay

For about 10 years now, my wife and I have been sleeping on the third floor of our old house. I'm not sure if the attic was originally meant to be used as full-time living space. There's a toilet up there, but few electrical outlets and no heat. It might have been used as storage or servants' quarters, or maybe as an emergency bathroom for a crazy uncle hiding in the attic.

The third floor is too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, and (if you had even a lick of sense) you might ask why we'd choose to sleep in the attic when we have a perfectly good (or at least somewhat acceptable) house down below. The answer is that up in our uncomfortable crowded perch, we're away from the kids.

But still there are times when I question the wisdom of going to such great heights to escape from such small fry. During the summer, at least before I wedge the teeny air conditioner into the quarter-moon window, it gets so hot and sticky up there that I sometimes feel like a turkey basting in a pan of my own juices. (I know, a somewhat unpleasant image. Try living it.) And in the winter, there have been nights where we've had a sheet of ice — on the inside of the windowpanes.

Years ago, we put in a little gas fireplace to try and take off the chill. But since it's not a vented unit, it sucks the oxygen right out of the room. That's not so scary when you're awake — and can run from the room holding your breath — but I worry that some night I won't so much fall asleep as pass into a carbon monoxide-induced coma. In the morning, the house will be surrounded by police tape and klieg lights, with neighbors being interviewed by local news crews, saying stuff like "They kept to themselves a lot. He was kind of … odd, if you know what I mean."

So, we keep the gas fireplace at its lowest setting, which is just above the pilot light but a little south of actually doing anything useful. We've tried to compensate over the years by adding blankets to our bed as the weather gets colder.

But as anyone who has tried to sleep under too many blankets can tell you, get to a certain number of layers and they get top heavy and start to slide. You can doze off secure under three layers of warmth, but can wake up at 4 a.m. with the blankets in a pile on the floor. And you are curled up in a frozen, shivering ball, not able to feel the tip of your nose.

A couple of weeks ago, we were walking through a local store when we came across an electric blanket. I stopped and stared at the box. It had "his and hers" controls, so that each side of the bed could be set at a different temperature. The "him" and the "her" in the box's picture looked so warm and comfortable, nestled in their toasty nest. But I was still nervous about buying an electric blanket.

I've always had a fear of electric blankets, mostly because of my mother, who distrusted anything electrical, especially electric blankets. "Those things," she'd say, "will ELECTROCUTE you in your sleep!" as if that was what they were specifically designed for. I grew up picturing people slumbering away, little zzzz's coming out of their noses, a sudden flash and then horror as they flopped around like bacon on a grill. Still, standing there in the store, I realized that frying to death in my sleep was only slightly worse than freezing to death.

The first night, mindful of my mother's warnings, I put the blanket on the bed, threw some covers over it and went downstairs for a few hours to let it warm up. That night, as we crawled under the covers, I luxuriated in the toasty warmth. Since then, I've had trouble getting to sleep under the potentially lethal electric covers, but once out, I'm out till morning.

Don't be surprised if you turn on the evening news some night this winter and see neighbors being interviewed in front of a suburban Pittsburgh house, while paramedics wheel out a middle-aged corpse in a smoking body bag. I hope one of my neighbors steps forward, thinks about saying something mean, but then just says, with a hint of sadness in his voice, "Well, he was kind of odd, if you know what I mean, but at least he died … warm!"

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