The hot radiator and the cold sill.

February is when people buy a bed for the middle of the room and then describe, a week later, the cat on the windowsill. The room looked finished with the bed in the center. The cat had already chosen among three bad spots and was not interested in the fourth.

A lot of the cats we hear about live in houses that were cut into apartments. Fall Creek, the streets up East Hill, the older blocks south of State. The heat is a radiator or a baseboard that does one room well and leaves the window wall alone. You can feel the line of cold air along those floorboards with a bare ankle. The radiator face, meanwhile, is hot enough that a cat leaning on it shifts all night. The pipe is worse. We do not want an animal sleeping on the pipe.

The sill wins in the late afternoon because the glass still holds a little sun. After dark the glass goes cold and the cat curls tighter, or moves to the back of a sofa against the outside wall, or to a box that happened to sit near the heat but not on it. A bed placed by eye, where the rug looks balanced, is none of those places. Moving a cat by decree does not work. Moving the bed three feet, into the room the cat already uses after dark, sometimes does.

Wool is what we use because it still insulates when it takes on the damp from a windowsill or from a coat hung over a chair. A foam pad in that draft goes clammy and stays clammy, and a wash does not take the smell out of the foam. The fill in our beds is washed wool batting. The cover is cotton ticking, tied with tapes, so hair is not packed into a zipper. The backing is grippy enough for a wood floor. On a slick sill it will still slide. If the real spot is the sill, set the bed on a level surface next to it and accept that sunny afternoons belong to the glass. You are buying the night spot.

Do not block the only heat in the room by shoving a thick bed against the radiator. Leave the radiator clear. Two or three feet off the outside wall is often where the air has mixed, out of the doorway draft. If you have one warm room and one cold room, the bed goes in the room the cat already picks after dark.

We do not sell heated pads. A chewed cord under a radiator is a problem we will not hand you. If the apartment is so cold that wool is not enough, that is a heat problem for the landlord, not a product we should pretend to solve.

Summer is the other half of the same apartments. The sill becomes the only breeze. A dense wool bed is too much bed in August. Pull the batting out and store it dry, in a bag, off the floor, with air around it. Do not leave it in a sealed bin in a damp cellar. July in an Ithaca cellar will give the wool a smell you will not wash out. The sizes, and what we will not take back once a bed has been slept on, are on the wool beds page.

Dogs in the same flats have a simpler version of this. They sleep where the draft is not, usually against a person or in a doorway you would rather they did not block. The long bed is for the dog that stretches. It will not move a dog that has decided the hall is the spot. Clay from a wet walk is a separate problem: brush it off the cover dry, and read the mud note before you rinse the batting.