Not a Magical Winter Day

I was in touch awhile back with my friend Helen Deng in Changsha, China and she was having the worst winter of her life. It has been all of 15 days she said and a harrowing experience that shows no sign of letting up. I have never experienced winter and I always have had this poetic notion of winter where you sit in awe by the window as the snow starts falling down. Reminds me of a line by my favorite poet ee cummings “as when the heart of this flower imagines the snow, carefully, everywhere descending”. Well, seemed magical for this woman of the the tropics.

But in China right now, it is nothing near poetic. It is rather, chaos all around but in a way, as I sensed in my friend's reactions, also calm and stoic – perhaps, I thought, living up to the traditional Chinese trait of "chi ku" or "eating bitterness," enduring hardship without complaint. My overall policy for storms is, sit it out since we are well in the middle of it, hoping the sun shines soon, and hey, get warm by the fire!