Temperate City Life
Dec. 5th, 2005 12:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garranRachel has said, in the past, that she wouldn't want to live somewhere with a lot of tall buildings, because she wouldn't want to stop being amazed. Recently, I've been having cause to reflect how happy I am that I do - that I am able, as I said to J. when he was here, to take the skyscrapers[1] for granted as features of the landscape - to make my way every day out between these towering, strange, inscrutable monuments, and accept them as ordinary and familiar. Life as Miyazaki, the wondrous spilling over into everything.
Over the past few days, though, it's occurred to me that I may have a similar relationship (to Rachel's with the buildings) with snow; a lot of places, including Vancouver, have been snowed upon, and in among the pleased or amazed livejournal entries I have seen the occasional curmudgeonly comment from someone for whom it's much more commonplace, and who cannot stand the stuff. I feel wistful, the years when we don't get any, but I'm glad to live somewhere where snow is rare enough that I see it as a cause for wonder, and not as a nuisance.
It isn't so simple, of course: my familiarity with the skyscrapers has not made me contemptuous of them. I'm sure that there are many people who live someplace with snow every Christmas, and still love it fiercely. But I'm grateful for what is plentiful, and I'm grateful for what is scarce, and I still like my city very much.
([1]: They scrape the sky! What a wonderfully evocative word to find hidden and unremarked in our everyday language. That is what the structures themselves are like.)
Over the past few days, though, it's occurred to me that I may have a similar relationship (to Rachel's with the buildings) with snow; a lot of places, including Vancouver, have been snowed upon, and in among the pleased or amazed livejournal entries I have seen the occasional curmudgeonly comment from someone for whom it's much more commonplace, and who cannot stand the stuff. I feel wistful, the years when we don't get any, but I'm glad to live somewhere where snow is rare enough that I see it as a cause for wonder, and not as a nuisance.
It isn't so simple, of course: my familiarity with the skyscrapers has not made me contemptuous of them. I'm sure that there are many people who live someplace with snow every Christmas, and still love it fiercely. But I'm grateful for what is plentiful, and I'm grateful for what is scarce, and I still like my city very much.
([1]: They scrape the sky! What a wonderfully evocative word to find hidden and unremarked in our everyday language. That is what the structures themselves are like.)
