For the very first time in my life, I find myself in remote,
distant Minneapolis in the long months
of October, November and December. The house I live in is centrally heated and the inside
temperature is monitored at 67 degrees fahrenheit. Outside it is around 8 degrees fahrenheit, the
ground is covered with snow, and the concrete
stretches outside car garages are
cleared by the people who own them, either manually or with the help of snow blowers. The snow on the roads in upmarket suburbs is scooped up by giant snow shovelling
machines that deposit it on the once green stretches or on the sidewalk in mounds, Sand and salt are spread on all motorable roads to prevent ice skids. Little snow hillocks rise slowly on the pavements as
each day, fresh snow storms swirl by, and the sun makes brief, sporadic
appearances, choosing to be a fair weather friend in this bitterly cold
season.
Except for the fir trees, that provide the only outdoor
green, every other tree, oak, maple or birch has surrendered its foliage to the
cold season. Each of these trees now stretches leafless limbs into the sky,
supplicating perhaps the sun. Life however continues comfortably,
inside of heated cars and schools and offices and malls and eateries, where the
temperatures are maintained at tremendous cost, providing relative comfort and hot beverages to
everyone who can afford it.
Driving past houses in the dark, once the fall ends
and the trees are bare, house fronts and porches start dressing up noticeably, a little before the onset of Halloween. I saw a fair share of cobwebs, witches cycling, flying on brooms or
upside down, spiders, ghouls, ghosts and zombies as house front decorations. I even
met the three witches from Macbeth in front of a fiery cauldron at a humongous store
selling Halloween decorations and I watched enraptured as they spoke Shakespearean
lines at programmed intervals.
The witches and ghouls are replaced by endless pumpkins well before Thanksgiving and the leafless trees in the roadside along market places are adorned with
lights that outline colourful Christmas tree silhouettes.
With Christmas barely ten days away, every house in the suburb I live in is
decorated with bright lights. White tubes run around the house walls encasing
twinkling lights that can be multi-coloured or monochrome, depending on how the
remote switch has been zapped. Trees in front of homes wear bright lights too,
returning in the daytime to their more recognizable bare outlines, while the
white plastic casings merge with the snow. Inside homes, Christmas
trees are retrieved from their cases in basements and decorated, with ornaments
and trinkets stirring memories and weaving colour and light into the cold
season.
The malls beckon and
Thanksgiving sales followed by Black Friday sales are succeeded by sales that
will go on until the end of the year. Meanwhile trees in homes and hearths
glitter and twinkle , and bags of gifts to be given and received accumulate
around the tree. There is good cheer in food and drink and festivities indoors
and the bitter cold has been very firmly confined outdoors by man made
technologies. Indoors, all is aglow and warm. Thankfully, the little match girl from the Hans Christian Anderson story will never walk through these streets and press her nose against a French
window, where the curtains have not been drawn and look longingly at the food
and fun heaped around trees and in cupboards and on table tops and counters,
and chests of drawers because even if she did possess a sturdy pair of shoes, she could never cover the required distance to these affluent homes.
How well the cold maintains established hierarchies, freezing them further.....
