Jane has a fight with her jacket

Winter needs to end, and here's how I know: My one friend Jane is fighting a pitched battle against her own coat.



The coat in question is long, down to Jane's ankles, and quilted, and puffy, and huge. Jane bought the coat because she was tired of complaining about being freezing all the time. With this coat, she thought, she could wait for the bus to work, hail cabs outside of bars, and wait outside people's apartments while they looked for their pants, without having to do that jiggedy up-and-down "I have to pee" dance of coldness that all New Englanders have perfected over the years.



And it worked. At first.



Jane and I would go out, she in her big puffy coat, me in my green vinyl car-seat trench, and she'd be warm as toast and somewhat disdainful while I did my dance.



"But I love this coat. It looks so cool," I'd tell her.



"No one looks cool doing that dance thing," she said.



But then, the coat turned on her. One day, quite recently, while getting ready for work, Jane went to her closet to put on her coat, and burst into tears.



"I can't take it anymore," she said. "It's so fucking HEAVY. It's BREAKING MY BACK."



Because I don't believe in insulting your intelligence, I'll just tell you flat out: that coat had metamorphasized from an innocent article of clothing into a full-blown metaphor. It had become twenty pounds of goose down, and a bad case of spring fever.