Love and the seasons

When I arrived in Claremont in late April, the weather was still cold, especially at night. On my first night in our house here, when I hadn't bought comforters and covers yet, I had to sleep with everything I could conveniently wear on me; in the morning, I had to wear socks as the floor was so cold. The next day, I bought the thickest comforter I could find for our bed, and cotton slippers to wear around the house.

Since then, of course, the weather has changed dramatically. Daylight has lengthened; the sun has become more relentless; the air more taut and daunting. Summer brings its own rhythms and expectations. In the shops and in catalogs, everything shouts of a season of luxuriant redolence at the beach, on vacation, or simply doing nothing much at all. (I remember reading in a trashy magazine once that Ben Affleck said that all he wanted to do for summer was to sit around at home in his underwear and eat pizza.) For days on end, it seemed as though all the cooking shows on television were devoted to nothing but that most sempiternal representation of summer: outdoor grilling. We almost got a grill ourselves.

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Over the last few days, we've been going through a small (in the big scheme of things) heatwave. The newspapers tell us that this summer has been cooler than last year, and somehow, my heat-addled brain fails to comprehend that. At 100 degrees fahrenheit, everything indoors and outdoors seems to glisten with a hazy sheen of unreality. Things slow down. Things feel different. After a cold shower, I put on my t-shirt to find it hot -- yes, hot -- to the touch of my wet skin. Our house -- so well-insulated against the cold of the winter -- has become a furnace made only bearable by our rickety airconditioners.

I have always looked forward to autumn. (That word even has a delicious, poignant sound, carrying in its ancient Latinate ending a sense of ambivalence and uncertainty.) Even now, there are big advertisements for "Back to school" sales. It feels as if an entire continent is awakening from deep hibernation to leap, with eyes half opened, into a new year. I remember with gratitude, surprise and wistfulness how I looked forward to the start of the new school year, and how I would chafe to return to New Jersey around the end of August, with a desire to restart my life, to pick up where I had left things off in May or June. Now that I'm 33, I think what surprises me most about my previous self at 19 or 20 was my sense of optimism and anticipation, an unshakeable belief that life would get better, that each year, I would puzzle things through and emerge alright, whole, myself, in the end. Even now at 33, I want to hold on to this earnest sense of hope, this gift of seeing things as they should be, not as they are.

Seasons change. Soon, the air will lighten up again as the summer's oppressive heat seeps away. I hope for some rain, and even better, for a good old-fashioned thunderstorm. (I have almost forgotten what thunder sounds like - a clap, a clash, a rhumba of elephants on our old wooden floor?) I hope for good apples, pumpkins, and a patch of soil to plant my waiting arugula seeds. And I look forward to the sense of change that the passing seasons bring. The earth rotates on its axis. The clouds and the stars shift their places in the skies. The plates below us move in their tectonic fashion, and the mountains I see every morning grow, nanometer by nanometer, every year. And, hopefully, we grow too, deeper in love with the people who grace our lives, who expand our horizons and who celebrate the growth that change brings.

It is marvellous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvellous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air suddenly clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses.
An electrical storm is coming or moving away;
It is the prickling air that wakes us up.
If lightning struck the house now, it would run
From the four blue china balls on top
Down the roof and down the rods all around us,
And we imagine dreamily
How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;
And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one's back
All things might change equally easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
Changes as the kisses are changing without our thinking.

- Elizabeth Bishop (date unknown)