Winter is icummen in

November 9, 2013

     In New York City, Winter is icummen in as Ezra Pound wrote, and people are taking it badly.

     After a lulling Indian Summer, temperatures dropped during the week, and tonight, Friday, they are absolutely cold.  Everyone is hang-dog-faced, as if no one told them the good weather would ever end, and they are not happy about it.  New York's winter winds are starting to slap us around.  We are not quite ready for winter, judging by the glum faces in the subway cars and the uniformly drab turn-out.

     In a few days, we will recognize that winter is part of life in New York and pull out the sweaters with Icelandic prints, the duck boots and the funny knitted hats.  Skating on the ice rinks in Central Park and at Rockefeller Center will be more popular, and everyone will start talking about the installation of the mammoth Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center.

     At the Metropolitan Museum, the Neapolitan Crêche, with its hundreds of carved figures of Wise Men, shepherds, angels and the Holy Family, will light up every evening at 6 p.m.  The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park will have an exhibit associating its medieval collections with the season.

     On the eve of Thanksgiving, behind the Museum of Natural History, the gigantic balloons made to look like popular cartoon figures --Mickey Mouse, Superman, Miss Piggy-- will be inflated while thousands of visitors file by to watch under the glare of cameras and police keeping the rota orderly.

     Thanksgiving Day, Macy's parade will kick-off at 9:00 a.m., and every inch of Central Park West from the Museum to Columbus Circle, down to Macy's Seventh Avenue and 34th Street store, will be chock-a-block.  When I was a little girl and we lived at "Lincoln Square" --65th Street between Central Park West and Columbus-- , my parents would let my sister and I, a kindergartner and a first-grader,  walk down the street to Central Park West alone, to watch the parade.  We would squeeze ourselves through gaps between legs larger than ours to get to the front.   There we would watch the parade until it was time to go home.  It is one of my happiest memories.

     In Manhattan, when it becomes very cold and the sun is shining, the limestone façades shimmer.  The winter light and the fewer number of people out in the cold weather turn the city into a movie set.  Should we have snow, that is still another way of experiencing the life of the city: the newspaper vendors, the food trucks, the buses are there for you:  I once rode down to a popular British grocery on Hudson Street, Myers of Keswick, in a blizzard, arriving just before it closed, so I could pick up one of their pork pies.  I rode the M6 bus through the snow, the only passenger all the way through Greenwich Village, Chelsea, Herald Square and the Theatre District, before anyone joined me.  There is a delectable stillness all around whenever it snows hard here.

     The next day, everyone goes back into action.  If the snow falls on a weekend, no one more so than parents with young children: Central Park is invaded, every hill in the heart of the park, the Great Lawn and the Sheep Meadow, is the scene of a battle for sledding space.

     The big exhibits open at the museums, the blockbuster films scheduled for Christmas premiere, the Winter Antiques Show comes to the Seventh Regiment Armory.  Cyclists are fewer, but some persist in riding, even in the most frigid conditions.  No one thinks them eccentric.  The Circle Line still goes around Manhattan Island, the Staten Island Ferry never stops running, and Ellis Island remains open.

     The IKEA Ferry to Red Hook Brooklyn continues to ply the waters of the Brooklyn waterfront to take customers there, where they can buy Swedish food: smoked fish spreads to squeeze out of tubes and onto slices of bread; salmon roe, lingonberry jam.  If you walk from IKEA on to Van Brunt Street, you can walk into the Fairway supermarket and buy a sandwich and a coffee to enjoy outside while you take in the Statue of Liberty from the only unobstructed vantage point in the five boroughs. As the ferries crisscross the harbor, you can dream of when Brooklyn was a city in itself, and Red Hook was where the boats unloading cargo docked, in the Erie Basin on the other side of the Upper Bay from Bayonne.

     Best of all, when it is really cold here, or when it really snows, all the movie theaters are empty.  You can actually enjoy a movie in peace then.

     The next day the snow starts to turn to slush, the salt on the sidewalk ruins good leather, and burns the soles of dogs' feet.  Everyone gets used to winter eventually, or you don't live here.  It's winter like nowhere else  --or maybe it isn't.