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Feared season turns out to be filled with strange beauty
By NICOLE SHEETS - Moldova column
In Moldova, you have your good ice and your bad ice.
Bad ice is a glaze, transparent or milky. Good ice is slightly slushy, gritty in its thaw, with some traction.
After a snow packs down on the sidewalks and smaller roads, the bad ice digs in its teeth. Kids slide and skate. Old women baby step. Peace Corps volunteers trudge bravely on in Yaktrax, rubber grips stretched on the bottoms of our boots.
The other day, as I looked out the window in the foreign language teachers’ room, one of my colleagues said, "You really can’t wait for spring, can you?" implying that I had perhaps made one too many comments about the glaciers receding outside.
OK, I do get my sandals out of the closet from time to time and wear them around my room, just to remember what they feel like. I do wait for spring. But lately, when the temperature has tipped above freezing, it’s not hard to find delights in the winter I wasted so much time being afraid of.
On the bus, for example, the windows may steam from all the people inside, but they don’t ice up; you won’t see little portals etched in the ice where folks were watching for their stops.
I can steal a moment outside now and then with my head unhatted.
The daylight stretches by "rooster steps" (another idiom I liked and stole while in Finland for the holidays). Five o’clock still has light.
And then there are the sounds. In extreme cold, it’s as though sound has frozen, crystallized. But I recently heard the next-door-neighbor’s goat singing a riff from his goat song, and it heartened me. Same with the birds whistling somewhere in their leafless trees. Or shouts from kindergarten kids suited up in their bright coats and scarves and elf-looking hats on the playground.
Even as, in some way, the growls of the dogs on my street do as I go for a run by the lake at Valea Morilor. I’ve been living in this neighborhood since the end of the summer, and I wear the same sweatshirt, the faded purple hooded one, every time I run in the cold. But the dogs bark anyway, maybe from their boredom of living behind a fence, maybe to remind me, in case I’d forgotten, that we’re all a little warmer, and alive.
Nicole Sheets is a Peace Corps volunteer in Moldova. Her e-mail address is moldovanicole@yahoo.com. Her column appears on the Life page the first Sunday of each month. More about Peace Corps Volunteers who have served in Moldova
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This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Moldova; PCVs in the Field - Moldova
