Poem for a cold November night. Cold day too!

Frosty has arrived on the rooftops and on the grass.  Two consecutive mornings of feeling blasted by the cold air when I ventured out to the front porch to get the newspaper.

The car's thermometer display said 27 degrees (not in Celsius!) when I left home yesterday for work.  This morning, it feels that the overnight temperature might have been down to 20 or even the high teens.  Way, way below the normal for this time of the year.  I suppose old man winter is poking his head early through the couple of leaves left on the trees.

It is this cold because it has not rained for a while.  The sky is clear--plenty of sunlight during the day, and moonlight streams in through the windows in the night.  Makes me fondly miss the grey, overcast, and rainy conditions because if we had those rains, the temperature would never dip this low.

Back in India, in high school physics, we learnt about how cloudy nights are warmer.  That was one of the many "theoretical" ideas that made me wonder why we didn't have more local, contextual examples to work with.  I recall another situation too, which was also about heat.  In that word problem, a guy orders coffee for himself and his friend, who is expected to join him in five minutes.  He adds cream to his cup of coffee, while the friend's coffee is black.  The question asked us to think about which cup would be the warmer of the two when the friend arrives after five minutes.

I had no problems working out the physics of cooling.  But, I could not understand why they made coffee that way--after all, I was only used to the traditional பில்ட்டர் காபி, which is something like the latte we drink here.  Perhaps it was me and my limited imagination, but back then I thought the whole coffee by itself was pretty darn stupid.  Even more confusing was the "cream" part; what the heck was that!

All because the book used examples from a cultural context that was alien to me.  Alien then.  Not strange anymore.  Now, I routinely drink black coffee, and buy cream or milk only if I have to take care of a visiting friend.

Back as a kid, "the weather outside is freezing" was also nothing but a theoretical understanding.  Now, I experience it, a lot more than I would like to.  It is almost as if I came here to this part of the world to do the practicals, as we referred to the lab work then, in order to understand the theory.

I scanned the web for poems that would tell the story of a cold night in November. I lucked out; here is one:

November Night
by Adelaide Crapsey
Listen. . .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.