I had not thought it would be so cold. As I’m attempting to draw, I grouch and mutter obscenities and complaints about the weather and the pain in my fingers. They feel like balls of lead, the flesh hard and red with the cold. I’ve arrived almost two hour early, and it’s a curse not only because I’ll have to wait, but because I’ve left the house in the warmest part of the day, when my flimsy jean jacket felt like enough.
As I try to keep busy by drawing the mailboxes in front of me, the wind plasters the icy flaps of my jacket tightly against my lower back, where the flesh has gone numb. The frigid cement seeps into my legs. The drawing is a struggle; I’ve used three pens to get as far as I have. They keep drying out against the blistery wind.
I have to get out of the cold. I find one of the many federal buildings in the area where a nice warm skyway is calling to me. The monkey suits around me don’t seem to mind a ragamuffin sitting in the middle of their skyway. I can see a big beautiful clock tower that looks like it was made with the color palette of Lincoln Logs in mind. My warmed hand takes to the details easier and the repetitive motion of recording the stacking, consistent architecture of the castle-like building becomes calming. Every now and then I can feel someone stopping behind me to look at what I’m drawing, and I dutifully lower my hand and pretend to be working on the lower windows.
Afterwards, I spend more time looking for something to draw than actually doing any recording. I’m miserable and my old, worn out thrift store shoes are letting my feet down. They ache and ache and ache
and ache
and
ache.
My teeth chatter. I want to draw the older building closer to the river, but I also want to stay close to the coffee shop the class will have to meet up at later. It wastes even more of my time, and I spend longer in the horrible wind. I try to record the other clock tower, squatter and less grandiose than the first one I’d drawn.
While my hands are still warmed I’m able to take down quite a bit of information. I like seeing the silhouettes of the buildings I should be sketching off in the far distance. I like the protruding letters of the company logo against the rusty brick.
After that, my hands become to cold again. I can’t successfully draw the barred-in parking lot next to the clock tower.
Giving up, I head back to the river and search desperately for somewhere warm to draw from. No luck. No lobbies to hide in. I curl up in an agonizing little ball, teeth chattering as I take on the old flour mill and the detail of the river area. I can’t manage the same level of accuracy as before, completely unable to ignore how unbearably cold I was.
My hands ache and they’re strangely wet. The bottoms of my feet are raw and they pound as I make my way back to the coffee shop. I hate the drizzle that’s seeped into my ink drawings and smeared them. I hate them too for speckling my face even as I try to hide it in my useless coat.
At the coffee shop the cold won’t leave me, despite the heated upper room. I notice there are a lot of people coming in to study. One man takes up a whole table with his books while his girlfriend watches him boredly. I overhear three girls discussing Hiyao Miyazaki’s animated interpretation of Howl’s Moving Castle against the original novel by Dyanna Wynn Jones. I want to tell them to shove it, because I like the animation just as much as the book.
I hate the cold, but later, as I look through the sketches later, I’m happy with what I have. The weather hadn’t been so great, but the exercise is valuable. The non-precious handling of my recordings of beautiful old buildings is something I am unaccustomed to, and they provide a funny-in-hindsight moment where I fondly remember my frozen fingers and sullen attitude.
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