Yesterday was really cold, bone chilling cold.  Desiring to move about,  we decided to visit the Japanese Tea Garden on the Fabyan estate, a short drive by car from our home.  After all the sun was out,  the trees, stone lantern, and moon bridge would be spectacular with a cover of snow.

Yes, the vista was striking, as the photo illustrates.  The Fox River in the distance was almost frozen over with virgin ice.  A few more days of single digit cold will result in ice strong enough for skating.  Walking for a hundred yards to the garden, the frigid air bore upon exposed skin, knife-like.  The skin tightens, retracts as the chill increases blood flow to ruddy cheeks.  We five adults, and a child a few weeks old returned to our vehicles, to the safety of warmth.  It seemed a good idea to proceed to the nearby Panera Bread restaurant.

On the topic of winter cold, I read this New York Times piece yesterday.

In a video published to Ring TV under the title “Neighbor Saves Woman from Freezing Temperatures,” a woman in a T-shirt, shoulders hunched with cold, rings the doorbell. She’s locked out of her house, she says, and is hoping someone could call her husband.

A voice from the Ring device asks who she is; the freezing woman says, “I live across the street.” In the video, the door isn’t opened and the husband isn’t called. Instead, the Ring owner informs the local authorities. The woman outside remains on the stoop, stomping her feet for warmth, until the police arrive. It’s an odd interaction for people who are described as neighbors. It’s a vision of American alienation, in which human interactions are mediated first by surveillance cameras, then by law enforcement.

Or maybe there’s a simpler answer: No one was home.

The Policing of America’s Front Porch by John Herrman

Click the link if you’d like to see for yourself the clip from the Ring device.

How easily I forget my relationship with Nature.  Nature, that great  energy exchange mechanism, impassive, law-like, the planet spinning in elliptical orbit, follows bent space around our sun, the axial tilt resulting in the regularity of four seasons, solar radiation driving the climate variation of evaporation and distribution of moisture — life giving to all plant and animal life.

We the living are a singular community, finding nourishment and shelter in our relationship with everything else.

Cold in excess of a narrow range is fatal to us.  Instinct alone insinuates this conviction within each of us.  Our grandchild who was with us on the frigid pathway to the Japanese Tea Garden knew as much.   Such a strong belief is equivalent to an unconditional ethical commitment, what we owe to one another.

Perhaps it is more clear what sticks out as anomalous, disturbingly wrong, in this story about our technology laden form of life.

Neighbors?