Snow, Ice and Himalayan Memories

It's not yet 5:00 PM and the day has already fled into a dark and smudgy night. There were some ice sprinkles in the rain that dripped down this morning. More will follow tomorrow, apparently. On days like these, I first give thanks that I don't live in northern New England and then I reflect on my poor pioneer spirit. Would I have lasted two hundred years ago when there was no modern plumbing or central heating? I suspect that had I arrived in the New World before the modern age, I would have traveled no further north than southern Florida.

It's not as though I haven't been tested. My army childhood involved a couple of brutal winters in the Himalayas where my father was once posted. A small town near the Indo-Bhutan border, the station had just been converted from a field area (no families, forward area) to a "hard peace" station (i.e. families could stay but housing was very iffy). The first six months or so we lived in two rooms and a patch of verandah, the next few months we lived off-base in the "civilian" part of town, in the house of a retired war-hero general. This house overlooked the residence of Kazi Lhendup Dorjee whose wife the Kazini Eliza Maria, a colorful European adventuress, guarded her property with the zeal of a hundred guards. God help any child whose ball bounced off the terrace into the manicured gardens of the Kazi's house. As we shivered and shook our way through the Himalayan winters, the Kazini and her booming voice provided a little noise and color in our unheated lives.
Now the chilblains of my childhood are forgotten, but I am still ambivalent about winter. As I am now settled here in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and not likely to move in a long time, I can safely say that I like it best when I am sitting in a warm room with a hot cup of my favorite tea, looking out at the bleak weather. The tea - Darjeeling, the taste for which is one thing I did bring away with me to the warmer plains of the south. And the one taste that has endured a move across the seven seas.