November melancholy
November 27th, 2008
There’s a busker in the Place-des-Arts metro station almost every afternoon at rush hour, playing Moonlight Sonata on his keyboard. Three notes, over and over again, echoing off the walls. Beautiful. Haunting.
The melody stays in my head as I walk home, setting the tone for the rest of the evening. It is already dark, long ago. The days are so short now.
Outside, a few snowflakes fall lazily, trying only halfheartedly to amount to something, but succeeding only in lightly dusting the ground and the shining pavement. There’s no more ambiguity now about the season. The trees are bare now, autumn leaves replaced with Christmas lights.
Hardly anyone is on the streets. Even in the middle of downtown on a Thursday evening, it’s quiet. They’ve all hibernated. Gone underground for the winter.
The headlines today are all from Mumbai, and they’re all horrifying. Nobody reacts much. The rest of the news is about the economy. People worry but they don’t panic. They can’t quite work up the energy to panic. They exchange platitudes at the water cooler before heading back to their desks to cough and sneeze. They work hard, but they’ve slowed down since everything was new. The shorter days make everyone tired.
South of the border, it’s Thanksgiving. Here it’s just another day, like all the others. Maybe with a little less life than yesterday. And tomorrow with a little less life than today. They say it’s supposed to be the festive season, but aside from last night’s hockey win, people can’t seem to find much to be festive about.
November is a month of endings. Cold rains and early snowfalls, without the joy. The knowledge that winter has set in and will be here for the next five months. A long road with no end in sight. We walk it steadily, one foot in front of the other, because it’s all we can do.
And so we draw those we love close to us, hunker down and wait for spring.
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