For A Cold Winter, With Love

Winter can be best described by the Danish word: hygge Its meaning sits between warmth and coziness, between friendship and a fireside, between happiness and comfort

If you are living in the right hemisphere, the beginning of the year always coincides with winter. It is not, however, the bleak, endless greys of a November, but a more upbeat, hot-chocolate-marshmellow-pot-au-feu yumminess that has the promise of hygge in it (Hygge, for the uninitiated, is a Danish word taking the world by storm. Its meaning sits between warmth and coziness, between friendship and a fireside, between happiness and comfort). I would think it is something you can see in the eyes of a cat curled up on a warm stove as the snow storms outside.

Winter is also my favourite time of the year. For ten years, I lived in a city where this season was non-existent. It made up with an unrelenting monsoon where the rains washed away everything including the crumbling bits of your soul. It also converted me into a pluviophile. This January is different. To step out, I need to submerge myself into a warm woolen jacket, hide my ears under a toque and coil a scarf around my throat. I have to become a ball of clothes bracing against a desert wind.

I love it, this dressing up for the weather. It’s almost like I am getting ready for a date to meet Mr Temperature. He is very difficult, this date, and I have to be prepared. He makes up for it by letting the sun shine fiercely as the cold gusts blow, by turning the skies into colours I have never seen before and by giving the air, a smell of crisp nostalgia. He sometimes makes the world so pretty that I hold my breath and wonder what I have done right to deserve so much beauty.

I know people who hate the winter. They cry for the sun and at the first hint of a drop in temperature, they pick their skirts and run to more tropical climes. They vow with a ferocity that even dims the noonday sun that the only liveable temperature is one above thirty degrees centigrade. Their bodies listen to their words and droop in the cold, under the weight of continuous sniffles, perpetual fevers and strangled coughs. I pity them, these haters of the chill, these nescient beings who don’t know the indescribable joy of touching the frozen, red nose of a loved one with fingertips that can barely feel.

In another month this season of wearing socks indoors will end and the earth will throw fresh, shooting tendrils that if allowed, will grow between our toes. A parakeet green will wipe away the steel grey of white. Yes, the winter will end. And perhaps, I will be one of the few who will mourn this loss.

Still Figuring It Out’ a funny, sad, questioning take on adulthood will appear every Saturday on Asianet Newsable. Arathi Menon is the author of Leaving Home With Half a Fridge, a memoir published by Pan Macmillan. She tweets at here. The views expressed here are her own.