Vanilla Walk

It's been snowing for ten adament hours now and it is not even letting up. Outside temperature is twenty below the freezing point, and the area is covered by atleast 10 thick inches of snow. Streets are mere stretches of white, refelecting the sodium glow. Ruts of tires are the only attempt of human defiance at the face of nature's awaited indifference. Despite the odds outside, I returned-half, muzzy, frost-bitten, cold,groggy, and tired at my home in St.Cloud, Minnesota.

When it is winter, it is all about survival at this part of the world. For about 7 agonizing months, the only thing you care about is warmth. Starting late October, the weather here looks sullen. Although, it is fall on calendar your body starts feeling the sting of the cold. And when you think you are braving it out, the winter chisels in. By the end of November St.Cloud sheds the last vesitge of green and wears the dominant color of winter. It marks the beginning of a protracted struggle for survival.

St. Cloud is a small university town, where one can meet students from over 85 countires flocking around the campus. Most of these students have hardly ever endured a nip below 15 degees in their homecountires, let alone trudging the snows.And for them it becomes all the more severe without a personal transportaion. Students who manage cars, live to see the place differently;for others it is a matter of living another day. But with just a slitty opening around the eye-area, and sometimes with wet feet (despite putting on the best 'snow boots'), these 'no-car' students move around heroically. It is a mark that sfits the tough from the tender. For them, at negative twenty, life is just a drop of irony.

Don't know where I came from, can't figure out where I'm heading to

De Rerum Natura:On the Nature of Things

I finally managed to creep out. Making a web presence makes you feel the part of the bandwagon and sometimes it is important to be 'in the loop,'-that is the way the world goes round. However, joining the bandwagon of 'Lions, and tigers, and bears! Oh, my!' This is not an easy task. And those who care for me, persistently feel that I am a writer who has so much to write about but hardly anything to publish. This is an emerging fact, which you will soon realize.But despite all my earlier and (promising) reverses, I am unyielding.

I will continue...