Why I miss cold weather

It is June in Texas, and so far the heat has been merciful--"partly cloudy today, with a high in the mid-nineties." I moved here from a snowy Boston where everything--driving, walking, moving out of your house--is made complicated by the weather. The worst is bundling up to walk somewhere, getting warmer as you move, taking off your coat because of the walking or because you have entered another overheated store, and then being stuck always carting around your big bundle of Gor-tex.

But here I am in Texas, and the grass always being greener wherever one just was (feeling unhappy at the time), I have suddenly remembered what I love about cold weather. This being only June. Here is my praise:

Cold weather makes you more aware of yourself as a unit. This feeling is hard to put into words because perhaps one only understands it when deprived of it. It's like when you have someone to spoon with in bed, and you think to yourself: "I have to think every minute about how comfortable this is, how warm this is, how her hair is tickling my nose" but you know that no matter how hard you think, once she is back in Washington you will feel that somehow you didn't appreciate, could never comprehend at the time how much you would miss it. Anyway, something about cold air around you gives you a sense of the borders of your own body, because that which is around you is cold and it sparks at you when you touch it. Your mental map of yourself in the world is better defined, and you can walk around thinking, "This is me here, that's the air, I am one and one is I," though you never actually would be thinking exactly that. In the heat, I am spread around like butter: I feel blurred as to what is me, what is steam, what is sweat.

Cold weather invented comfort clothing. Cold weather is when it matters that on the little hook in the closet is a hooded sweatshirt with a tear in the sleeve. The blue shirt stolen from Daniel. The flannel sheets... oh, yeah, they're in Washington now. In the heat, all clothing is discomfort, and the former partnership between body and clothing becomes rancorous--like Ford and Firestone each blaming one another for rollovers after the treads came off the tires.

Light. I hate winter in New England most importantly because of light. The way we have structured our turn-of-the-century lives is all wrong in terms of northern winter. We spend our precious daylight inside. When it is dark we are on the streets driving, we are buying groceries, we are in the gym on a treadmill when we could have and should have taken a jog during the day. But I have learned that too much light is wrong too. Texas is far enough south that the hottest part of the day is around five, and sunset at nine. You come home from work, and you want the sun to make some sort of change to mark the fact that your day is over. You want it to commiserate with you, to somehow reflect your fading energy as newspaper-reading ends and thoughts of dinner begin. You might even take a quick nap--and how disturbing to wake up at seven to find the sun still pounding away as if it were noon. It is like a rock album without a single slow song. I have always hated that type of relentlessness.

So I will wait for autumn, or more likely for winter, and for the melancholy gusts (ghosts of glaciers) that remind us who we are and how to map it, that create for us an entire geography of comfort in our house. Or in a house in Washington, somewhere far away.
posted by Adam at 11:46 PM [edit]

Lights out: five minutes in the colonias

I stay right in the colonias now when I come down to the Border for work.
Everyone else was in McAllen. I stayed home to draw and eat cereal.
Our apartment is on the second floor in a typical unpaved street in the Las Lomas subdivision.
The lights went out. I was brushing my teeth.
I bonked my way out of the apartment onto the deck, toothbrush still in hand.
Everyone came out from the apartment below. All the kids, at least.
Someone next-door had a flashlight. "Apenas iba a bañarme,"
says the sister, "I was about to shower." Joe, who is seventeen, says,
"Look at the stars!" and we all look up, me still alone on the balcony
but looking up with them. I found out later that Martha was in Wal-Mart
and they waited with their shopping carts in the dark.
"You can finally see the stars!"
The funny part is that there are hardly any streetlights
in the colonias, and after five minutes when the lights come back on
I can still see pretty much all the same stars. But Joe isn't talking about
light pollution. He means: the t.v.'s off, everyone's outside, my sister
was about to shower, we're here in the driveway, and you can finally,
finally, see the stars.
posted by Adam at 12:21 AM [edit]

The valentines of lines

Last night I had a dream that Chile
bordered on New Hampshire. You had
a party in New Hampshire for all our friends
and I wasn't invited. I went for a hike,
or cross-country skiing. At the sloping
place where the Whites became the Andes,
I couldn't decide where to go: into the familiar
embrace of Santiago smog and kissing hello,
or the hard path back to your house. Stuck
in the middle where mountain air makes
the valentines of lines, I went up,
vertically.

posted by Adam at 3:02 PM [edit]