I never thought I would miss my hot and humid Dhaka days
until moving to Minnesota, where, as the popular joke goes, the four seasons
are: almost winter, winter, still winter and road construction a.k.a summer.
For someone like me, who spent most of her life in a tropical country, summer
is the only season that brings a sheer sense of happiness to her life abroad.
In Minnesota, I have seen snow showers in May. I switched
“heat” to “A/C” in the same day and back again -- yes, weather can be this
unpredictable. In winter, I feel so good when the temperature is 0 degree
Celsius because the average January temperature in Minneapolis is -11 degrees.
It is therefore no wonder that I, more often than not, miss the hot and humid
Dhaka, where I never had to put on four layers of clothing before stepping
outdoors, where I could paint my nails and flaunt them almost all year round,
and where I rarely wore any footwear other than sandals and open-toed shoes.
Some people are sensitive to home heating systems,
especially those who move from hot to cold weather. I have friends whose noses
bleed when the home heating system has to be switched on during the winter.
Although I have not suffered terribly from a bleeding nose but it does happen
to me once in a while every year. On those days, I feel like zooming off to
Dhaka, where summers are sticky but winters are not brutal.
Although in Minnesota, people eat ice-cream in winter, it is
not so much fun as having it under the scorching sun. In Dhaka, I craved
ice-cream every day. Here, I crave ice-cream only in July, which is the hottest
month of the year. Although ice-cream parlors remain open all through the year,
but who wants to hop into one when the world outside is already under what
looks like sheets of vanilla ice-cream.
Most of my closet space is dedicated to heavy winter coats,
sweaters and jackets. They take up so much space that my regular clothes have
to be folded and laid in layers on my closet shelves. The result is I often
forget what clothes I have and end up buying a second top of the same color and
design. But I always try to return such an item if I have not already trashed
the receipt.
Here, spring breeze cannot caress my hair because the season
spring only resides in the dictionaries sold at Minnesota stores. Even checking
a cell phone is not easy. I have to take my gloves off every time to check my
cell phone. And in those few seconds, my fingers literally freeze. I have to
carry a packet of facial tissues with me all the time during winter because my
eyes water and nose runs in the bone-chilling wind.
So in frigid Minnesota, I miss being in tropical Bangladesh,
where I once used to complain about heat and humidity like most of its other
residents. But once one settles in a place, where winter lasts from October
till May, one realizes that heat and humidity are not too bad.
*This was written sometime in July when I was still living in Minneapolis.
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