Today is the first cold—real cold—we’ve had this fall. The sun, hanging low in the southwestern sky, provides only glancing warmth. Finally looks like winter too: last week’s windy front blew most of the remaining leaves from the trees. In a particularly wooded stretch of trail I imagine being shrunken to mite-size, and that I wander through the upturned bristles of a hairbrush, or across the stubble of a man’s cheek.
The baseball fields are silent now, and bicyclists are all but vanished from the park. Just a few bundled souls on the walking paths. No one’s adapted yet, to the chill: you can imagine folks rising from their couches, opening their front doors with the best intentions of stretching the legs and taking in some fresh air, but then shivering, shaking their heads, and closing those doors extra-tight. “Nope. Not today. Maybe tomorrow.” Sure—they’ll adjust eventually.
You can’t just wait for spring, after all. You can’t refuse to play along with the changing weather. You can’t just claim it’s all a hoax. Winter doesn’t care about your feelings. The seasons are indifferent to your sufferings and unmoved by your protests.
Yet the children in the playground have already adjusted. They don’t care about the cold. Today their mothers stand, stomp, and shuffle, hands thrust deep in their parka pockets, where only a week ago they’d lolled on the benches, chatting and laughing. Now they stare at their offspring with intent: “play, dammit, play,” they mutter in bursts of condensed breath. The kids are oblivious. For them, every day is a lifetime, and adaptation need not take until tomorrow, next week, or next month, but only a few moments: “Brr! Cold. Swings!”
For adults, it takes very much longer: “This is the way things were. They no longer seem to be that way. I cannot yet accept that.” But of course you have to, one day or the next. Just takes a while.
Or some may never adapt. They’re the ones still wearing shorts in January: “Bah,” they scoff, “it’s not so cold,” even as their legs turn blue. No, they’ll simply disbelieve, and go on disbelieving until April, when they’ll loudly proclaim, “I told you so!” As though there were triumph in observing that everything passes, sooner or later.
And anyway, there’s no point in waging war against Mother Nature. You might score a temporary draw, or uneasy cease-fire, but she can outlast you. She outlasts us all. We’re powerless. But that’s a difficult, frightening fate to accept, knowing that in the end, there’s nothing you, I, or anyone can do. We’re all but fleeting particles, blinking in and out of existence in an unfeeling universe. But that idea doesn’t sit well with some people.
This past weekend, against my better judgement, I entered a Home Depot on a Saturday morning, looking for the lumber and hardware to construct a porch swing. The trip was worthless: all risk and no reward. They had almost none of the fasteners I needed and the lumber quality was shit. And while most everyone in the store wore masks, the per-square-foot density of shoppers meant that it was impossible to stay even two or three feet away from anyone else, let alone six.
Then there was this one guy. Big beer belly, four-day stubble, a permanent scowl, and a Glock in a leather belt-holster, the weight of which dragged his stained cargo pants halfway down his ass. That’s right: he didn’t care about no virus. I assume he meant to shoot it if he saw it. And maybe he carried the pistol also to warn off loudmouthed fools like me, who otherwise would tell him to fuck right off as I passed.
Regardless, I was already well into a slow-motion panic attack when I spotted him, thanks to being in such close proximity to so many other people of unknown provenance, and to my rising frustration at my inability to locate any of the merchandise I sought. So ego trumped id, and flight beat fight: I kept my mouth shut, paid for some stainless washers, and got out fast. Any confrontation with 9-mil-man would have to wait until another day.
But there’s fight, flight, and a third option as well: patient, stoic indifference. Outside the park now, on Reynolds, two members of the Lexington Christian Academy’s varsity soccer team are moving one of the goals into position on the practice field’s western endline, in preparation for an afternoon scrimmage. It’s cold, and the wind has picked up, but they’re having practice. There’s still practice. It may even rain soon, but there will still be practice. What does it matter, the weather? And back on the playground, as the moms stuff their mittened hands ever deeper into their parkas, the kids still play. It’s still time to play.
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