AS I HAVE been writing this book, I have turned into sort of a madwoman of cozy. I’m ALWAYS asking myself if the thing I am doing is cozy and why. Washing the dishes: Cozy? Yes, due to the combination of temperature, organization, and control. Delayed airplanes? Well, I’m not going to be idiotic and say that a delayed flight is cozy, BUT, it is what it is, and a delayed flight is a perfect time to make lemonade out of lemons using methods of cozy. Do you like to read? Paperbacks of bestselling books can be found all over airports. You might connect with humanity by people watching. Anyone fighting? Kissing? Eating a burger? Reading a newspaper? Or maybe you would like time alone—the search for a corner where you can enjoy a cup of tea might be the coziest thing you will do all week. Even coming up with an alternative plan can be soothing; there is a satisfaction in making something work. This is cozy. Let’s take it to a more difficult degree: the emergency room. Whoosh, this is a tough one. I was in an ER twice in a month. Once by myself in the middle of the night because I thought my appendix was bursting (Peter would have come with me, but I didn’t want the teenagers to wake up to a no-parent household; as grown up as teenagers seem to be, they really are kiddos). Turns out one’s appendix is on the other side of the body. It was probably a kidney stone, but I still was in the ER for a good three hours. Up on 168th Street at two thirty a.m., I had to really search for cozy. It was cold, it was scary, and there were people in dire straits. So how did I find it? First, I watched the nurses at the nurses’ station. They have an entire world going on behind those huge U-like desks. Through a level-seven pain, I eavesdropped on conversations. The nurses were gossiping—the universal tendency to talk about others. This made me feel connected to them, which made me think they could help me, which was soothing. The doctors passing by were wearing soft-looking scrubs. I imagined how many times they must go through the wash, how many other people needed their help. This made me feel less alone. I sat in a corner—always a cozy plan for me. Someone brought their pregnant wife a sandwich and chips, which gave me faith in humanity, because I pictured the person in the deli making the sandwich. Even if people are unaware of it, they are helping one another. This gave me hope. The takeaway here is that tuning in—connecting to what’s going on around you—is how you get cozy.
Animals are tuned in ALL THE TIME.
This might fall under the umbrella of Too Much Information, but deep in the middle of the other night, I unceremoniously threw up, out of nowhere—must have been something I ate. Anyway, we can all agree it’s an unsettling experience. As I lay back down, hair still in a ponytail, damp from washing up, feeling ill and breathing heavily, I wondered to myself, What on earth is cozy about this? How do people who feel like this all the time get cozy? I rubbed my feet together, thought about the children, thought about my husband, who was across the country, worried about why I had thrown up—was it the crab cake? Or could I be sick? Cozy wasn’t finding me, and I wasn’t finding it, and then, as if she knew, my thirty-pound hippopotamus of a dog, Maude, galumphed over so that her back was up against mine. Contact. I thanked everything for her.
When dogs settle, they sometimes take a big deep breath in and let it out accompanied (if you’re lucky) with a guttural hum. Feeling the heft of Maude against me, I took a page from the canine book and drew a deep breath in and slowly let it out. Maybe I was sick; maybe all wouldn’t be well—but at that moment, the only way I was going to be cozy was accepting the unspoken support Maude was giving me right in that moment. I fell asleep.
This instinctual, loving awareness is why there are service dogs. It’s why there is a movie called Lassie. It’s why, for crying out loud, they say dogs are “man’s best friend.”
One could write volumes about how cozy animals are—and people have. My pal Julie Klam wrote a deeply beloved book called You Had Me at Woof; there’s the famous Marley and Me by John Grogan—of course, Jane Goodall’s My Life with the Chimpanzees is astounding. I just read a book called The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery that sort of changed the way I thought about everything. A marine biologist recommended it to Hugh and me when the three of us spent a good forty-five minutes watching a giant Pacific octopus cling to a wall at the Seattle Aquarium.
Here are the coziest animals to me: dogs, gorillas, dragons (mystical, they fly, and I had a beautiful china plate with dragons on it in my twenties), donkeys (my mother adores them; they are one of her animals—so compact), pelicans (nothing in the world is as much fun as watching a pelican or three plow through the air), parrots (funny creatures—they eat when the humans do, and they love getting a bath), blue crabs (spent summers in Maine searching for them all day; they nestle themselves into rocks and the baby ones are tiny), panda bears (really, I grew to love them after watching the movie Kung Fu Panda), iguanas (steady creatures), cows (gentle and lumbering), and elephants (wise, smart, loving animals). If you choose a few animals in the amazing biodiversity to love, they will be touchstones your whole life. Looking to nature for coziness is a layup.
I saw an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art called “The Golden Kingdom.” It’s an exploration of the gold work in the ancient Americas—the Aztecs, the Incas, and the peoples who came before them from places like the Andes, Central America, and Mexico. The golden nose rings, crowns, and mouth coverings could be worn on any red carpet now, they are so exquisite and fashion forward. And there are animals on almost every item. One resplendent crown was an octopus, one nosepiece that belonged to a female ruler from 400 AD had crayfish or shrimp with jade eyes on either side, and one mouthpiece was a bat. The explanation of why the craftsmen incorporated animals into this work, which people wore and would be buried with, is that animals connected the people to God. Animals were the pathways to the next phase of life after the physical one they had just lived. I too believe animals are closer to the spiritual world.
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I JUST FINISHED training a puppy (a second dog), and it’s a frustrating, pee-pee-soaked business. Coziness is constantly challenged: you have your life in a routine, your things set up in a pleasing way, rituals in place that support your being cozy in the world, but it all comes crumbling down with a new dog in the mix.
At three a.m. one frigid January morning, while I coaxed Duke around a dirty pile of old snow, anxiously hoping he would connect the elusive dots that “outside” means “toilet,” I thought, Now what in the hell is cozy about this? I wasn’t warm, I was disoriented, and I was alone on the streets of New York—sort of; who knows who might have been lurking around—and then there was HIM: the clueless sniffer. It would take some searching to find the cozy.
Irritated, I looked to the moon to give me guidance. And then, of course, as is so often the case, I thought of Little House on the Prairie. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote a series of books about her and her family’s experiences as settlers in the western United States—prairie life. One need only to look to its pages to get set straight. In this case I thought how many chores everyone in every single book does. They milk cows, chop wood, preserve vegetables, sweep out the cabin—you could get eight pages on the mechanics of mending a fence. The careful tending of the house, the earth, and the animals was at the center of their lives. Now, my survival certainly didn’t depend on tending to this floppy puppy’s needs, but his did.
Thinking about Little House brought me right out of my frustration and gave me a sense of purpose. I marked the clear air and the wonder of the darkness. I thought about who was sleeping and who was awake. Thousands of people in the city tending to something. Maybe a mother was up nursing her baby, or a dishwasher was finishing up in one of the big restaurants, garbage collectors or writers burning the midnight oil. In thinking about the chores of life that everyone has, and the one before me, I was connected to humanity.