The weather alters, flipping and flopping. Negative fifteen degrees wind chill cancels school. Two days later we are promised a balmy thirty-seven degrees and as the week rolls on…showers, heavy grey rain and the thermometer pushes the edge of fifty.
As the school year evolves; ebbing and flowing…summer skirts are quickly traded in for…not rain coats, not thick fleecy transitional jackets…no sweaters…rather, full strength and length winter coats. A mere fifty degrees with a raw autumn wind, a heavy rain, a brutal snowstorm with a winter advisory…and thick winter coats it is!
Observation; from the smallest tike in the pre-kindergarten room to the eldest care giver…there is no luxury. There are no varied seasonal changes of clothing. This is the struggling, poorer end of humanity. Transitional clothing is a middle class concept.
Cold or hot. Simplicity. Limited. And it rains…wetly with a swirly breeze. There are glimpses of what precipitated in the early autumn, what happens in mid-winter and what will occur before the end of March. After a few really cold months are completed…what then? Old worn out coats. Dirty coats.
There is a raggle, scrabble wetly soaked gang of kids awaiting entry in the school foyer. The orange autumn energy pours off them as steaming, cold rain dries off the sun baked leaves and the frozen lilac bushes in Highland Park or runs down the clogged and frozen gutters of Joseph and Clifford. Bright eyed angry enthusiasm about everything; they are open to anything…the good, the bad…the angry and the uprooted. This neighborhood band of Roma banters loudly, jostling each other while they wait; smacked down hard by family and street.
I tip toe away, vanishing down the length of the empty hallway, entering the silent elevator…listening to the clamor fade as the metal box ascends. It seems all my life that it rains and snows on Fridays…
690 Saint Paul 