I Love the Cold in Paris

This is what the past week or so has been like in Paris:



The days have been cloudy, foggy, damp, and sometimes rainy, bordering on cold. The kind of weather that some people would call "miserable." But I love it. There is something about the clouds and the drizzle that is embracing, enfolding, comforting; something about the cold that is cleansing and clarifying. To me it says: Be calm. Be at peace.

Perhaps I feel this way because I was raised in a place with a real autumn and a real winter, a place where in the winter people had to bundle up in warm coats, hats, and gloves to go outside, a place where the warmth of a house or a bar or a restaurant felt like a refuge, a place where "nature" was not a beautiful, abstract entity named Gaia, but rather a freezing, brisk north wind, two inches of ice on your windshield, and numb fingers and toes. The National Weather Service says that at 7 p.m. yesterday in Santa Rosa it was 75 degrees (23C for my one French reader); even though I've lived in California for 20 years, that is still bizarre and unnatural to me, part of the reason why, as I've noted before, in some ways California seems more foreign to me than France.

So I look forward to the temperatures falling even further, I revel in the damp fallen leaves, in a real autumn and a real winter, I enjoy the biting chill when I exit my building, and the warm welcome when I arrive at my destination. Intellectually I know that what one thinks of as "natural" are simply those things with which one is familiar, but what I feel is that this place of dark and damp and increasing chill is home, a place that puts its arms around me and says, be quiet, everything is going to be OK.