Rain

The weather in Pittsburgh has not been good recently. For the most part, we have alternated between light snowfalls and rainstorms, and the sky has stayed a permanent grey. The days are shorter, now, and I need to be more conscientious about my time at the park.

When it gets cold in Minnesota, it gets very cold, but for the most part, it is a dry cold that stings your face, burns your throat, dries out your lungs in such a way that you feel hollow and raspy. Here, with Lake Erie not far away (in the grand scheme of things), we get a damper type of cold, and I have trouble deciding for myself which type of cold is worse. Sure, snot never freezes to my face in Pittsburgh, but there is a lingering dampness that chills your bones, and more wind, and many, many more clouds. Not gentle stringy clouds, either: thick, robust grey cumuli that block out the sun. It is cloudier in the summers here, too, of course. I think being in such a narrow valley surrounded by so many hills gives Pittsburgh a sort of snow globe affect: the moisture in the air has nowhere to go, so it just hangs around.

The dirt in the park is damp, soft the way you'd expect manure on a farm to be. Thankfully, it has a better aromatic quality than manure, though. There's a real, musky richness to it. That moisture in the air-- I can only assume-- also means that the grass does not dry out in quite the same way that it would back home. By April, when the snows recede in Minneapolis, you start to notice that the ground has been flattened out like hay laid out for a horse. Here it stays thick and green, and although nothing will sprout out of the soft, nutrient rich dirt for many months, it seems to be enough to sustain what has already grown-- at least for now, and at least in Frick Park.

There are signs of man-erosion in the park, where heavy equipment has been rolled onto the grass, or where generations of people have discovered shortcuts, and this is the time of year that the mud from after a rain-- like we had last night-- gets tracked back onto the concrete paths by people's shoes. The playground nearby is empty. I go over and tap one of the hollow metal poles that supports the jungle gym, and it is icy and rings a bit louder than it used to. This is not the type of ground that you want your children to fall headfirst on: cold hurts.

The squirrels are gone, and the park employees are busy doing some landscaping on the park's edge, certainly trying to sneak work in before we get our first snowfall that actually sticks-- that doesn't immediately run off down the straight, narrow roads that climb the hill from the river.

I spoke with a coworker who lives near here the other day, and she told me about how it is too cold now for her and her husband to work their garden, how they have a "winter project": constructing a headboard for their bed out of the wood from an old door. I ponder this for a bit. Recycling can indeed mean many things-- unexpected things.

And she tells me that she and her husband will continue their morning walks along the path that abuts the river. We talk about how nice it is down there-- it's the path that stretches from Pittsburgh to Washington, the one that avid cyclists ride the whole length of to prove themselves. I've seen children that I know on the bike path with their parents, and now I'm learning about my coworker-- a middle aged woman who has lived near here her entire life-- using it for her walks. It is a community gathering place, in a sense.

I walk down the hill from the patch of park with its sad, ghost white trees, their leaves raked up into piles. I go through the fog, and down to where the bike path is. It is behind a chain-link fence, and a few people are using it. The blacktop looks fresh and new, and is split down the middle by a dotted bright yellow line. But it seems to me a human imposition: this is not our natural space. We have contained nature in between two fences, in fact, and the only thing growing is weeds and grass along the path's shoulders.

The greyness-- and dampness-- of the day makes me feel a bit somber, so I head home.