A white blanket and a special hush

In my school days I read that humans in the primordial era used to live in caves for safety in order to be protected from attacks by the beasts and from severity of the elements. Since the time I came to learn about my primeval ancestors living in caverns, it was my primal urge, kind of my animalistic desire, to live in a cave-like place.

I could at last satisfy my innate desire of living under the ground in the new underground abode inside a basement that I rented about a month back in College Park, Maryland, USA. My little shelter in the newly refurbished basement is quite cozy and pretty warm. Initially, I had a little humbling experience living in a grave-like place with two small slider windows that were at the level of my head. From the basement with two-third of its sidewalls dipped underground looking out the windows, which on its outside are barely above the ground level, is like peering out the small openings in a prison van. I used to laugh at the pitiable condition of the prisoners on move whenever in Bangladesh I found the prisoners eagerly peeking through the small air vents of a prison van while they used to be shifted to or from a prison.

Every morning as I wake up I reflexively peer out the windows of my room in the basement to see the morning's first light and to guess the rest of the day's weather.

Last Friday morning, a strange, almost indescribable tranquility seemed to radiate from the surroundings. The familiar environs outside underwent a dramatic change in the previous night. I was literally stunned and at the same time I felt a little frightened at the never-before-seen sight of a thick white blanket of snows that enveloped everything I could view from my room: the lawns, the cars, the roads and the trees. It was amazingly strange. It was curious. It was breathtaking. Such heart throbbing serenity, such solitary expanse of the neighborhood in such heavenly whiteness was the first of its kind in my lifetime.

The entire panorama around was bathed in a kind of a ghostly glow in the morning as the soft sunshine alighted upon the fresh snows that visited in Maryland for the first time this winter. The surrealistically silent morning gave me an eerie feeling too. The closest to my new feelings was somewhat similar to what I had visually experienced back in 1997 in Kuala Lumpur as I watched in horror the concluding part of the movie 'Titanic' when the search teams on rescue boats were moving in a peculiar hush while looking for any sign of any survivor amidst the icebergs and ghastly flotsams in the frigid and tranquil water of the Atlantic Ocean.

I am thankful that I did not go to the West Coast of USA despite repeated requests from my relations to spend my vacation in the Bangladesh-like weather in California in order to avoid the chilly weather in the East Coast. But I was determined to see snows and to brave the elements in Maryland, awaiting my dreamy snows to appear in reality before my eyes for the first time in my life. At long last, at my mellower phase of life, I have been lucky to see snowflakes falling from the sky and a huge white blanket of snows carpeting the landscape.

Wearing all the gears---my socks, my boot, my hand gloves, my jacket and my masks---to fight the chilly weather outside I ventured nervously out of our basement. With some trepidation I placed my feet on the sugar-like cottony snows---my maiden footstep on the surface of the Planet Earth covered by snows. Like a Neil Armstrong stepping on the Moon's surface I hobbled across the backyard for a few steps on the snow-carpet, creating in the wake some crunching sounds and leaving away my impeccable boot prints on the bright snows.

I wished I could find in the forlorn neighborhood someone, at least a child, who could teach me how to construct a snowman I read so much about in storybooks when I was a child. I felt desperate to release the child imprisoned in my deeper self and let my inner child play around with other children with sounds of merriment, making and throwing snowballs at each other.

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A white blanket and a special hush

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