Shiver
me timbers, it’s cold out there.
Cold
and gray, wet and cloudy.
I was out walking through Center City, weaving my way through the
rat race.
The
temperature? Just barely above freezing.
Even the sunshine seemed frozen.
And
the trees? Still dormant. Maybe, if you looked hard enough, you could see the
faint hue of spring budding on the tips of their branches but mostly they're just
lifeless, gray hunks of wood stuck in the ground.
The
brisk cold burned my ears, dried my eyes and stiffened my knees. I braced myself around every corner. It was stark, grim and plain. The wind pushed me against the skyscraper
walls and my footsteps made hollow chimes as if the whole world was made of
glass.
Sometimes,
I think it is.
To
keep my mind from numbing, I tried to remember and recite my tree poetry but
even that provided no refuge.
All
I could remember was the famous line from Shakespeare’s sonnet, the one that
describes the bird-less trees as bare
ruined choirs, or the Edgar Allan
Poe epic that begins: The skies they were
ashen and sober, the leaves they were crisped and sere…it was down in the dank tarn of Auber, in the ghoul-haunted woodland of
Weir.
That
wasn’t going to work.
I
could’ve handled the bad weather, maybe, if I wasn’t sharing it with so many
other people. They weren’t making it any
easier.
The
rat race was in full swing that afternoon…people racing from one side of the
street to the other, pushing their way out of the buildings, shoving and
hollering, weaving in between the jammed up cars…talking about sitcoms and surgeries
and lotteries…poking me with their umbrellas, arguing on the cell phone, spilling coffee, begging for money, sneezing in my face and
littering.
You
ever want to feel lonely?
Then
plant yourself in a crowded city street.
Maybe
it was the weather, these last days of winter gloom, but it seemed like all
those people…the whole wretched hive…were just buzzing around for one reason
and one reason only: to get in my way.
Don’t
worry. I pushed right back.
That’s
called the nature of the beast, baby.
When
I finally couldn’t take it anymore, I looked for the nearest exit.
I
needed a small escape, just needed to break loose from the rat race, just for a
little while, so I ducked into the first warm door.
Lucky
for me, it was the door to the Academy of Natural Sciences.
