Jasper looked at the forecast on Sunday night and said, and I quote, "That's actually perfect weather for a walk."
I want to be clear about what the forecast said. It said 39 degrees. It said "raw." It said wind gusts up to 28 miles per hour. It had a little cloud icon with what appeared to be a single ambiguous precipitation droplet that could have been rain or could have been snow, and I think the National Weather Service itself had simply given up trying to distinguish between the two. The forecast was not inviting anyone anywhere. The forecast was a closed door.
Jasper saw it as a personal welcome mat.
"It's April," he said, as though the month were a binding legal contract guaranteeing mild temperatures and soft breezes. "It'll be fine once we're moving."
This is the thing about Jasper. He has a deeply held, completely evidence-free belief that activity generates warmth sufficient to override actual weather. Not a coat belief. A motion belief. As if the human body is a small engine that simply needs to be running, and wind chill is a condition that only affects people who are standing still.
He wore the fleece vest.
Not a jacket. Not a layer under a jacket. The fleece vest, on its own, over a long-sleeve shirt, as though we were going apple picking in October and not walking along a semi-exposed path in Northampton in early April when the Pioneer Valley had apparently decided that spring was still just a rumor it had heard secondhand.
I wore my coat. My real coat. I also wore gloves.
He did not bring gloves.
We made it about eleven minutes before he started doing the thing where he walks faster without acknowledging why he's walking faster. Just a slow escalation of pace, casual, almost breezy — no pun intended — like he was simply a man who had chosen to walk briskly because he enjoys brisk walking, and not because his fingers had ceased to function.
I didn't say anything. I want you to know that. I had said something on Sunday night and I had said something again Monday morning and I had said something approximately once more while he was putting on the vest, and at that point I had reached my constitutional limit of saying things. I simply walked beside him, warm inside my coat, and waited.
By minute seventeen he had put both hands inside the single small pocket of the vest, which is designed to hold, at maximum, a chapstick and a gas station receipt. He was essentially hugging himself from the front. He looked like a man trying to shoplift a loaf of bread using only his stomach.
"How are you doing?" I asked.
"Great," he said. "Really good."
A gust came through and briefly lifted his hair in a direction that suggested the wind also had opinions about the vest.
"We could turn back," I said.
"No, I want to see the lake thing," he said. He meant the accessibility upgrades starting at Fitzgerald Lake, which he had read exactly one sentence about and had become inexplicably attached to as a destination. This is also very Jasper. He will shiver through forty-five minutes of wind tunnel conditions to look at a new accessible pathway that neither of us needs, simply because he read about it and it now exists in his mental map as a Point of Interest.
We saw it. It looked like a construction staging area, which it was.
"Cool," he said.
"Very cool," I said.
On the way back he accepted my left glove. Just the one. He held it in his right hand for a while without putting it on, and then eventually he put it on, and we walked back to the car with me in one glove and him in one glove and neither of us saying anything about it, and actually that part was sort of nice.
He bought me a coffee after. He got a hot chocolate and held it in both hands for the entire drive home and didn't put on the heat until I reached over and did it for him.
"I was just about to do that," he said.
"I know," I said.
He looked over at me and smiled and he was still a little pink in the cheeks from the cold and honestly it was a pretty good walk.
I'm keeping both gloves in my coat from now on.