Just a Passing Chill

“Cabin fever” does not do justice to our frozen state of mind. True, the Arctic temperatures that have descended on us in recent days have kept us in looking out while the oil burner adds to our carbon footprint and subtracts from our bank accounts. But “fever” is not the right word. I think “numbness” or “ennui” comes closer.

    True, a frozen Fort Pond Bay is a sight not seen in many years, and beautiful in its way. The beaches have that desolate feel, the cold ocean steaming as it loses the last of its heat. But our forays out to buy food, gas, or simply to be free of the house, are brief.

    The rest of the time, television brings us relief, in my case, the Turner Classic Movie channel, which has been showing movies that either won Academy Awards or were nominated for them. On Sunday there was a series of noir classics, “The Maltese Falcon” with Bogie, of course, and “The Blue Dahlia” with Veronica Lake and Howard DaSilva. And, there was the Internet too, but the Internet can be a dangerous place in the cold. Best to stay away from Facebook, especially when a good number of your friends are frolicking in unfrozen places.

    Filmmakers of the past used a series of editing tools not seen as much these days. A “wipe,” is when a new scene pushes the previous scene off the screen, usually right to left. A “dissolve” is just that; one scene seems to evaporate as the next, overlapping scene is brought to the surface.

    This was what happened on Sunday as I watched out the window as the snow fell in the cold, blizzard whiteout. I had been on Facebook where friends had posted cruel photos of warm waves breaking with palm trees in the Puerto Rican foreground. There were similar images from the North Shore of Oahu, the French West Indies, and one from a friend from California on a surfari to a semiprivate island in the Tahitian chain.

    I turned off the laptop, shuffled around the living room, and gazed out the window into the backyard, hoping to see the young deer we have been feeding old vegetables to. It’s tough to be a deer, or any other non-hibernating critter these days. Except maybe a hawk. They do well, I think, because their prey stands out against the white ground.

    That’s when I noticed the dissolve. Those tropical Facebook scenes were appearing against the cold, white scene outside. The green pines clothed in snow became palms and I thought that perhaps “fever,” with its tendency to produce hallucinations, was the right word after all.

    Now, if I can only project the opposite dissolve onto my Facebook friends, send a little of my frozen backyard to them as they sit on the beach — even if they perceive it as just a slight chill from a passing cloud. Serves them right.