Yesterday, just after 5pm EST, Indira stopped our phone conversation to marvel at the fact that–thank god!–there was still a touch of sunlight in cold, cold New York City. Here in Buenos Aires, just after 8pm local time, there was still plenty of light, not to mention sticky heat and pesky summer bugs. But even when our seasons swap and I have less light and more cold I still won’t get the freezing weather of my Upstate New York childhood or my New York City adulthood. And I miss it.
Like most people I appreciate the beauty of a landscape–country or city–freshly painted with pristine snow. But it’s so much more than that. Not only is my stocky, pale, hairy Northern European body engineered for dark and cold, but my spirit seems to be as well. I feel enlivened by the biting sting of cold–as if my engine revs up automatically–while the heat knocks me on my physical and emotional ass. Snow and sleet and ice and biting, freezing winds pull me outside. The summer makes me seek air conditioning rather than beaches, which to me–aside from cold ocean water–seem like some kind of vacation practical joke.
I’m not really going anywhere with this, but as I face another hot day in BA and think of Indira suffering in cold NYC, I find myself remembering that the last time I experienced a true snowstorm–a glorious blizzard!–was in Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, just shy of three years ago. It was when I was staying with my buddy Sue Berger right before my first, exploratory trip to BA.
I’ve experienced many amazing cultural delights since that blizzard, which started the evening of February 12, 2006, and continued well into the next day, trapping cars and turning the streets over to festive pedestrians. But since moving to this freeze-free region my body has never felt so climatically at home. And so I share a few images that I made during the storm. While my camera gear required trash bags for protection, my body was fine with little more than summer clothes. All the better to allow my skin to feel the warm burn of the wonderful cold.
