Cold
It is cold. Choose your favorite adverb to qualify it. Bitterly cold. Intensely cold. Cruelly cold. My fingertips have got a purplish hue, and my fingers are so stiff that I keep stumbling into the wrong keys all the time as I type. I wish I had mittens. I wish I had heating. I wish I had an overcoat. We are utterly unprepared for a real winter. The only resource we have to face the low temperatures is to dress in layers. Our sillouettes become round, as if we were rehearsing to be circus clowns with fake bellies. We have become quite pathetic, parading on the streets with woollen cardigans over tank tops and shorts. Many of us refuse to admit that it is cold, as if recognizing the need for warm clothes were a sign of weakness. Still the wind whips through the windows of our houses planned to be cool enough for our eternal summer. The chill seems to pierce our clothes and penetrate inside our bones. And we all long to see the sun again.
2 Comments:
perdon senora, this post might be a sentimental/emotional piece...but i have to ask this: i thought brazil is a country close to the equator therefore is more tropical, no four seasons..something like that. i'm really bad with geography but i think u know what i'm trying to say here.
the mention of winter in brazil makes me feel slightly confused. kindly explain please.
Not an emotional piece, Bibi. It is really cold for our standards in Rio (it was 12ºC as I came home tonight). Think of Brazil as a big inverted triangle. Equator cuts the area close to the base, in the North. There you have warm weather year round, 28ºC averages. But Rio is already in the vertix area in the South. It is pretty close to the Tropic of Capricorn. So we tend to have a hot summer and the rest of the year quite temperate. It is not usual to be as cold. This year, we had snow three times up in the mountains, which is unheard of.
Now let us go farther south, to the tip of the triangle. This area is way under the tropic, in the temperate zone. Well, they have winter. Mostly a snowless winter, but there is even snow in some areas. I spent some time in the South on business, and the temperatures were close to zero during the day. In fact, this was a cold spell, but no something unusual. This area tends to have four seasons and more moderate temperatures year round.
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