A warm act of kindness

Maybe I am part of a minority, but I sort of like this weather.\nI like waking up in the morning, peeking out of my window and seeing everything outside covered with a white blanket. I like walking through the snowy streets, looking at the white trees. I like watching the snow fall and playing in it. \nMaybe the novelty will soon wear off. Or winter will end first. Or the nuisances of the snow will start getting to my nerves. Whatever comes first, I will enjoy the season while I can. \nThere are, however, a couple things that already bother me: I am always inside a building; there is no hope of ever washing those squishy salt stains off my pants; I have to put on layers and layers of clothing before leaving home and take everything off again once I am indoors.\nBut even the nuisance of too many clothes has a good side to it: I don't have think about which coat I am going to wear in any given day. I simply put them all on. The only choice left refers to which is going to be the outer layer.\nOf course, it feels even worse when I get postcards of beautiful beaches where my brother spent his summer vacations back in Brazil, or when I read about Carnival that starts next week, which usually means spending the days dancing with less clothes than I sleep in here.\nBut maybe because I am too distracted by the nice things, or too annoyed by the excess of clothes, I sometimes neglect to consider that it is actually freaking cold outdoors and that I am reluctant to put on all my layers. \nLast Sunday was one of these days. I was late to mass, had to bike all the way to 17th Street from Bryan Park, and stupidly decided that I would be warm enough from the exercise to need any gloves on -- since I had lost them anyway.\nBy the time I reached Atwater I couldn't continue anymore. My hands were numb, frozen. My fingers were dead. I stopped my bike, put my hands into my sleeves and stood there, caring about nothing else besides getting my hands warm again.\nI stood there for a while, not willing to move, my hands useless. \nThen this woman came out from nowhere. She handed me a pair of red gloves.\n"Here, keep them. Stay warm," she said.\nI mumbled a "thank you," my survival instinct driving me to put the gloves on as quickly as possible. By the time I turned to thank her more adequately, she had walked away.\nI started moving again, in awe. Grateful. That woman could simply have seen me freezing in my spot and thought, "That stupid guy is trying to ride his bike in this winter without gloves. Idiot." Instead, she left her warm place, wherever it was, and driven by her kindness, gave me something she owned that would help me.\nThis one woman, with her single good act, certainly made bad things that I experienced before look small and insignificant. With one small gesture, she changed my whole day, and put me in a good mood for the week.\nMaybe we are sometimes too busy, too bitter, too hurt or too proud to appreciate and/or offer kindness. I feel that sometimes I fail to fully appreciate all the help that I have received since I got here, or neglect to provide help when I could.\nThat woman set a great example. \nThank you.