Relativity
“Everything
is relative in this world, where change alone endures.”
Leon
Trotsky
I
woke late this morning; daylight already. The light outside is white
and flat, sky and earth stark and identical. I stood at the kitchen
window and tried to help my sleep soaked brain understand the change.
Frost! Everything is covered with frost. Grass and cars and rooftops,
white, against a street that is black and clean, a dramatic contrast.
Then I see my neighbor with her two dogs, hot-footing it up the
street. She has on so many layers of clothes that she's completely
unrecognizable, but I know those dogs—the ones who used to turn
over garbage cans and ransack the neighborhood early in the morning.
Winter has finally come to Birmingham. A quick check of the porch
thermometer confirms my suspicion: 32 degrees.
That's
not winter, you say! Oh, believe me, it is. In this area of the
world, when the thermometer hits freezing, people quake and shiver.
We bundle up in everything we own and put on our fur-lined boots and
if possible, avoid the out-of-doors all together. Below 32 is
no-man's-land. We hardly ever see it. When I lived in New York City,
32 degrees in winter was a virtual heat wave. People were on the
streets in shirt-sleeves, acting as though spring had arrived.
Everything is relative.
Winter
is a welcome season this year. We need a good long stretch of it to
kill all the fleas and mosquitoes, and to replenish the aquifers and
refill our inland reservoirs. When we have relentless heat in the
south, as we've had for the past year, even our lakes and rivers dry
up. I pass one on my way east that has thirty or forty feet of
red-earth shoreline. And the Mississippi River is so low that barges
are running aground in the middle of it. Not good.
Tonight,
the fires will be lit, the toddies heated and everyone in Alabama
will gather around the television for that other life-changing
event—the BCS Championship Game! The Tide will roll against the
fighting Irish and we will hold our breaths until it's over. I found
that profoundly disturbing thirty years ago when I first arrived in
the Magic City. Now, I'm right there screaming my lungs out with the
rest. Everything is relative, y'all. Change alone endures.
In
the spirit,
Jane
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