Musing Over Rain, Reminiscing Winter

Pardon me for having a quick update on my blog. Only last Saturday I had my previous entry posted.

It’s raining in the evening these days, most of the evenings.

I love it.

I don’t know what kind of character would suggest I am for liking rainy days.

Just like those days in the US, I would prefer winter better than any other seasons. May be it’s beautiful in spring and nice colors of leaves in the trees in fall season. You may enjoy some phenomenal view on the changes of colors from day to day, spend your precious minutes watching leaves fall off that unwittingly kills your invaluable hours, as much as you may take pleasure in seeing the vegetations start to blossom in spring season until it creates heavenly scene all over the place.

Or perhaps the carefree of summer too.

But I like it cold.

I liked it to be wrapped in a heavy coat, with a pair of gloves, winter boots, thick sweater and bandana around my neck and also a cap & earmuffs when the temperature drops way below freezing point with ridiculously harsh wind chill factor. But I hated it when I had to use chapstick (a kind of lip gloss for winter use, if not lipstick). It makes me feel like my lips an-inch thick and when it dries up in the chilly winter breeze; it ends up your lips turn whitish like a type of monkey in Barbados. Initially I refused to wear chapstick as I imagined like a lady would but I ended up hurt my lips. You know when it’s exposed to cold winds, your lips will be too dry, you smile, and the surface tension on your lips becomes too great and it cracks. Bloody smile! And blood oozes out, like a Dracula.

For the consumption of people living in temperate countries like us in Malaysia that have never experienced winter in your life, do you know that in winter when it’s cold, it’s really cold? The kind of cold you'd have never imagined in your life. Nah, they would be running around naked for the kind of cold in Genting Highlands.

It could even freeze up the whole river and we would then have fun skating on it. It sometimes freezes up petrol in the gas tank of your car too.

You know, when it’s too cold, you’d feel like your ears are falling off? They say it does but I never came across one. And are you aware of the myth that if you pee in the open when the temperature falls below freezing point, your urine will freeze right up and you can see the spurt of frozen urine arched?! Don’t believe in it, of course it’s a myth.

Another myth is, if you lick up a metal object that exposed in cold, your tongue will stick onto it and when you try to pull it off, it snippets a good deal of the surface of your tongue. Foolish of me, I did try that on a guard rail next to our apartment. And prooven it’s not a myth. I was struggling to take my tongue off. Friends were laughing like hell. And it took me some time to have my tongue healed and even longer time as a subject of ridicule.

What about the story when I started off just now telling about rain? Oh yes, I like it when it rains. Again I am telling you.

It brings me back to the time when I was a kid.

We lived in kampung with poor living condition. When it rains, the ground becomes mushy and muddy. The only way to move around outside the house was to step on mud. Don’t even think of using shoes or sandals. They are of no use.

I remember when we had to brave through marsh of mud of calf-high for some 500 meters before we hit the main road to school. We would then hold our shoes in hands with funny looking schoolbags tied on our back. We only had our shoes worn after cleaning our feet at the well next to the wakaf at the main road, the point which did just half of the journey walking to school.

On our way back, just when we started to enjoy the warmth and comfort of our shoes, we had too soon reached the wakaf. Took them off and prepared for a sail through a marshland of mud and sludge yet again to get home. We thought we had cleaned the mud on our legs thoroughly in the morning but sometimes it stays filthy for the whole schooling day just like when we thought we had cleaned them sufficiently when reaching home but occasionally we slept with it till the next morning.

And guess what? The game we played after school sometimes had to deal with mud too. To the very least, we did enjoy sliding in the football field just like a pro stealing a ball from the opponent. Avoiding the squirt of mud into our face already requires half of the skills needed on the field and it perhaps contributes half of the fun for the game.

Scoring goals were only bonus.

That was all due to rain….

It was not too pretty then but it is a sweet thing for me to reminisce today. And we don’t talk about monsoon season towards the end of the year just yet. It’s another nice story altogether for me to relate. They call it flood but I call it big waters that cover the entire village. Love it! I used to write about this a year ago, Here but I’ll illustrate it in another perspective in future.

What makes me today? The rain still is dearly to me.

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