“You want me to come over and help you take those air conditioners out of your windows?”

I shook my head. “I hate to do that so early. We’ve got to have another stretch of warm days, right?”

The next morning when I left for the office, the thermometer shivered at 37 degrees. Because it was the first full week of Novem-brrrr.

I had forgotten that November is when the “brrrr” months get serious. Septembrrrr and Octoberrrr are a pleasant but often weird variety of 90-degree highs and 40-degree lows. There’s just enough brrrr in there to relieve the monotony of summer warmth.

But then comes Novemberrrr, followed in frigid succession by Decemberrrr, Janubrrrrary and Febrrrruary.

We were thinking about it the last two months, but Novembrrrr is when we claw through the closet to dig out the coats, hats, afghans and fuzzy socks.

The great philosopher Anonymous observed, “November: the month my thermostat and my bank account start fighting over the heating bill.”

It’s full on brrrr.

But some poet or other — his or her mind probably numbed into cold-induced hallucinations, wrote, “November is the coziest month of fall.”

If burrowing into a heat blanket while huddled into the folds of an easy chair is cozy, then I suppose it is.

As another great anonymous philosopher said, “November’s dress code: sweater in the morning, regret by noon, blanket burrito by night.”

According to the romantic notions, November features the soft crispness of fall air, but not the full-on chill of winter weather. You can still enjoy pleasant afternoons of raking leaves (for the record, I have NEVER enjoyed raking leaves in any weather), but the evenings are quite pleasant for sweaters, hot chocolate and board game nights indoors.

But I’d never considered November as cozy.

Other observations by the great philosophers:

“November is secret and silent.” — Allison Uttley

“November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.” — Emily Dickinson

“I have come to regard November as the older, harder man’s October.” — Henry Rollins

I don’t know exactly what those phrases mean, but I do know that they aren’t painting November as warm and cozy. Because it’s not.

As I relayed to someone recently, the brrrr months are the ones when your partner decides the best way to warm her icy feet is to bury them into your back, and you wake up in a jolt, shivering and clutching the bedroom ceiling.

“Keep those ice cube toes off of me! I bought you those thick, fuzzy socks. Wear them!”

“But, honey, you’re so warm.”

“Not anymore. Either pry me off the ceiling or throw some blankets up here.”

Novembrrrr is also NO-vember, a time to start saying, “No,” to people, places and things that drain your energy.

No, I’m not going for a walk in the crisp, autumn air; no, I’m not going Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving; no, I definitely am not having pumpkin-spiced anything other than pumpkin pie on Nov. 27.

Which reminds me, November was when my late wife hoarded canned goods — particularly Reddi-Wip. She enjoyed a smattering of pumpkin pie with her whipped cream.

One person — possibly my wife — said, “I’d romanticize November more if it didn’t get dark before my coffee finished cooling.”

That’s November — cold, dark and brrrr, with a bit of Thankfulness and pumpkin pie thrown in at the end. How it ever became known as “the coziest month” remains, as one great philosopher summed it up, like a mystery novel — “full of twists and I’m always dressed wrong.”

Brrrr.

Snuggle under the thick blankets and think cozy thoughts at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.