It’s now definitively winter in Santiago. It’s been damp and a bit rainy the past few days, but this morning it was unseasonably warm and humid, until the afternoon when ominous dark gray storm clouds gathered over the city and began to let loose. There has been flooding in some of the tributaries of the River Mapocho and they’ve had to cut the water in parts of the city, so we’re storing it in pots and pans just in case. This sort of weather is not typical of Santiago (nor was the day it snowed last year), but neither is 100-degree weather in San Francisco in mid-May (which, I must say, I prefer).

Winter here does not feel at all the same as winter at home. At home in California, we rush from heated home to heated school or office or store and back: the weather is an interruption. Here, indoor heating is rare and expensive and so the cold is something that you learn to live with all the time (and it’s only just beginning.) We wear wool socks and long underwear and at night dread getting out from under the many layers of wool blankets and comforters of the bed for any reason.

At home in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter’s dreariness is mitigated by holidays, good food, parties, family and friends. But in Chile, there are no important winter holidays. In fact, all of the holidays are taken out of their metaphorical (or metaphysical) context in the Catholic countries of the Southern Hemisphere: Easter, the paradigmatic spring holiday of new life and regeneration, is celebrated in the fall, while Christmas, a metaphor for finding light in a time of darkness, is celebrated in the middle of the summer at the beach.

Winter without cozy heated homes and the holidays to look forward to makes me feel as if I’m living in some sort of Dickens novel. The feeling was heightened the other day when I was at the hogar: nothing like a group of ten little kids sitting around a dining room table at an orphanage praying before dinner to make you feel like you’re living in 19th century England.

And then on Tuesday night, I rushed through the rain from school to meet my friend Lauren and her sister Brooke, who is visiting from New York, at the Teatro Municipal, a gorgeous neoclassical concert hall, where we saw Puccini’s La Boheme. The theatre was the perfect setting for the opera: we watched the Italian maestro’s classic tragedy centered upon a group of young Parisian bohemian artists from what were truly the cheap seats just below the painted ceiling, before going back to my chilly apartment for a cup of tea.

Ah, what would life be without an overactive imagination and the ability to see myself as the protagonist of any number of well-worn narratives?



The Bundy sisters