This morning on the way to work I caught a single sunbeam, slipping between the downtown buildings to stab me straight in the eyes at 6th and Clay. It's been so unceasingly cloudy for so long that I'd forgotten why you don't look directly at the sun: it hurts. I also noticed yesterday that I've developed a frightening, bluish pallor normally associated more with slimy underground lifeforms than actual human beings. It's not like I wasn't pale in California; in tan-mandatory Los Angeles I got teased mercilessly and in the multihued Bay Area I was the palest person in the room more often than not. Here everyone is pale by climate and heredity, but I am approaching Palpatine color and put them all to shame. Still: the sun. I put out my best leaves and turned my tiny blind earthworm face to feel it, and I think it did me some good.
People have told me that spring in Portland is stunning, phenomenal, worth every gloomy grey minute of the preceding winter. I've been skeptical, not least because they told me this after leaving Stumptown to move to California. But I finally think I may survive long enough to see if they are right.
Posted by dianna at February 7, 2008 04:29 PMBlue skin? Are you sure you haven't been drinking colloidal silver?
This week was unseasonably warm in New York, temperatures into the 50s, but sadly it's been overcast and drizzly the whole time. It's only been really clear and sunny this past month when it's been deadly cold.
Sadly, though, this past week for us has just been Pseudo-Spring. It'll soon get cold and snowy again. It's the false hope that makes the rest of Winter all the more depressing.
Note that Pseudo-Spring should not be confused with Winter's Death Lunge. You know in action movies how the hero dispatches the villain, and as the paramedics, or whoever, are hauling the villain's carcass away he'll rip his way out of the body bag and make one last attempt to kill the hero, only to have the hero, I don't know, blow him up with a rocket launcher? Well, in New York City Winter does that. It'll be well into April, the weather will be sunny and in the 70s, it's Spring and everything's wonderful. Then, out of nowhere, 20 degrees and snow! From Hell's heart, Winter stabs at us!
Posted by: MoltenBoron at February 7, 2008 06:29 PM