Stepping inside to the warm, hay-scented air-loud, panicked bleating coming from the first stall. It’s me at age 16, abandoning my bowl of granola and milk, racing out of the dining hall and down the icy, furrowed dirt road to the barn. One of my Februarys is all four sisters sprawled out on the yellowed living room carpet in the old house, our hands sticky with glue, the floor barely visible beneath a riot of spilled red glitter and white doilies and half-snipped construction paper hearts: the detritus of homemade Valentines.Īnother one of my Februarys is the sound of a bell clanging at a distance, echoing across the frozen ground in Wiscasset, Maine. Seasons lived stack upon one another, a pile of distinct moments I can shuffle through and examine. The road curves sharply through a wooded area, the canopy overhead filtering the waning sun into spirals, dappling the ground. I pass fewer houses: more streams, more forest. It’s walking back to the car-sticky with sweat and shaky with exhaustion-and driving home in the syrupy early-evening light, past the neighborhoods and shops of Roland Park, past the baseball fields and suburban culs-de-sac, ten minutes fifteen minutes twenty minutes, until the scenes along the road open up and smooth out into the gently sloping hills-all emerald green and neat white fences-of steeplechase country. It’s driving in our old blue Volvo station wagon to field hockey tryouts, swallowing down nerves as I pull on shin guards and cleats. Seasons are a shared experience, just like how we all indulge in comfortingly trivial commentary about the changes in weather- cold already! Not even Thanksgiving! or can you believe this humidity?.Īnd yet-seasons are all tied up in my own life (chapters, moments, days, hours, celebrations lived inside, around, and intertwined with them).įor example: As August draws out its steamy hold on summer, refusing to let go as September nears, any one of you can sense the quivering tremor of change in the air, thinking about freshly sharpened pencils and clean, crisp notebook pages and pink erasers.īut my late August isn’t yours: mine is the sweltering, heavy humidity of Baltimore. I don’t own any of it: Not the perpetual rhythm of seasons, nor the flood of nostalgia as each one edges in upon another. Hundreds upon thousands of people might list the same moments that “winter” brings to mind: the way powdery snowflakes melt on your eyelashes, twinkly white lights strung up against a stand of evergreens, White Christmas on the radio in Bing Crosby’s velvety baritone, peppermint stick ice cream, the sting of snow inside your mittens on a ski slope, a bowl of clementines, the scent of pine sap, cinnamon rolls warm from the oven. I’m not the only one to delight in the papery crunch of fallen autumn leaves under my feet, or have the instant-trigger experience of smelling a whiff of woodsmoke and having my head fill with images like a movie on fast forward playing in the darkened theater behind my eyelids: foliage in New Hampshire, flannel shirts, knobby crimson heirloom apples, apple cider, apple cider doughnuts, apple cider-laced apple pie. They’re both mine and not mine at all-any old person can walk down a street carpeted in cherry blossoms, warm soft spring air ruffling their hair, and can tell you of the lightness and brightness that starts to stir somewhere down in their wintered-over heart. I know he meant them as separate items (loneliness for a happy clan of close friends who live back east and dreaming of the physical passing of seasons)-but to me, they’d be one and the same.Įast coast seasons are so deeply familiar to me my relationship to them as intimate as family. I asked why, and he responded: “Loneliness? And I miss the seasons.” I can easily imagine feeling both emotions keenly if I moved somewhere far-away and warm. Yesterday, a friend wrote me to say he was moving back to the east coast after a few years in Los Angeles.
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