Now that mild weather has departed this region, I am shamefully reminded of a visitor who came to our house one December evening some twenty years ago.  

Henry was a longtime friend of my parents-in-law who were already planning to celebrate Christmas with us. At our suggestion, they invited Henry, who would otherwise have been left to himself, to join us. Though our small  sparsely furnished house did not offer all the comforts that this visitor was used to, still we hoped he would have a good time.

As it turned out, however, Henry looked all evening as if he was having a perfectly miserable time. He sat politely and clearly tried to make the best of it but his distress was evident. As I came to realize only later, he felt frozen.

Then in his middle eighties, our guest was used to temperatures in his own living room almost equal to his age.  To be sitting in the home of other people who set the thermostat in the low or middle sixties was painful for him.

At one point in the evening I remember turning the heat up but I am sure it did not come close to Henry’s comfort zone.

At that time I believed it healthier to keep the temperature lower than most other Americans do. I judged that it might even be unhealthy to stay in a house that was too hot. My house would be a model of modest energy use.

Of course, I was then middle-aged and had not yet myself become very sensitive to the cold. I was used to living in a house where the thermostat was kept low. Beyond that, the house itself had poor fitting windows and doors that allowed cold air to seep through. As a result, I got used to wearing sweaters inside the house and adopted some-thing of a macho approach to coping with winter.

But in my seventies, I now know from personal experience what it is like to feel uncomfortably cold. As an elder, I have become very sensitive to cold air. Whenever the temperature outside drops, I am now prepared to raise the temperature inside far higher than ever before.

My winter clothing no longer seems adequate to me. Wind and cold air pass right through my jacket that featured, when purchased, high-tech ways of keeping out the blasts. But nowadays my poor midriff feels every bit of the cold and I shiver when it en-gulfs me. Things have gotten so bad that I feel forced to wear a hat, something I have not done since Jack Kennedy abolished them from American life.

I have also tempered my attitude about going to Florida or Arizona for the winter or even for the duration. Not without traces of prejudice, I used to ask: “Why exchange the rich cultural life normative in New England for the cultural wastelands of the south and the southwest?” Let others join flocks of snowbirds but never I.

That fundamental resolution has not changed. Now, however, I understand much better why so many of my age peers decide to go. The prospect of warmth and freedom from snow has become increasingly attractive to me. At least, let me plan to get away occasionally in order to break up the winter.

I presume that most other people in later life cannot bear the same cold that they easily accepted when younger. But, I have discovered,  the reasons for this remain unclear even to some physicians. The two doctors whom I consulted for this column surprised me by not exactly knowing the answer.

The first doctor has noticed the difference in himself. “I don’t tolerate the cold as well as I used to,” he acknowledges. And he realizes it’s not simply in his head. In his view.  “it’s a physiological issue, not just a perceptual change.”

My second contact, now a physician/journalist rather than a medical practitioner, seemed unfamiliar with the phenomenon, despite years of experience as a geriatrician. He does recognize in himself much less willingness to undergo pain for pleasure – by facing cold blasts on the ski slopes, for instance. But he pleads lack of information about feeling cold in normal settings.

Of course, the physicians know about hypothermia, the crisis that results when body temperature drops too low. Many of the causes of this condition are familiar to doc-tors, especially illnesses such as arthritis and Parkinson’s disease that limit physical activity. Certain medications can also make the body more vulnerable to the threat of hypo-thermia.

So at the end of this column I am no more enlightened about the subject than I was at the beginning. But I retain a strong sense of having changed in my response to cold weather.

And I now know first-hand what Henry went through in my living room on that Christmas day decades ago.

Richard Griffin