Cold. Dark.

In spite of myself, I love this time of year. When the air turns cooler, my body and mind kind of sigh, just as they do when the air finally turns warm again after the long months of the brutal cold of winter. As the sight of lilacs and tulips makes my heart sing, the sounds of the birdsongs make my head spin, the feel of the sun’s warmth makes me yearn to touch the air, the cooling off of my world is also a relief. The bloated air thins. School begins and the days where nothing extra is required come to an end.

Yet winter is around the corner. As a child I remember how every day seemed an eternity, the prospect of the next season an eon away. These days everything seems to lurk just around the corner. The weeks fly by, equinoxes and solstices appear like magic, my own birthdays seem to trail on the heels of one another. Winter weather will emerge soon and as the days grow shorter and darker, my mood will inevitably change. The warmth and light of day makes me giddy somehow, even my somber moods are lighter in summer than in winter. The idea that I can just walk outside anytime, jacketless, free of goosebumps and the feeling that I have to grab myself around the shoulders to protect my body from the assault of frigid air, is liberating and I can almost forget what is to come, can fool myself into thinking that this could possibly last forever.

When I find myself immersed in the dark for those difficult months, everything I do takes a bit of extra effort. At home lights must shine almost continuously, the forced air from the furnace dries out skin and hair, causes sparks of electricity on the sheets. At the very first, the idea of last year’s sweaters, the hope of newness that the bin of my carefully folded fall wardrobe brings is heartening, then as my side of the earth moves away from the sun, my brights seem drabber, the tiny balls of fabric my soft flannel sheets have formed, more annoying. I engross myself in my studies, nightly board games with my family, jigsaw puzzles spread out and slowly coming together on the dining room table, and if I remember to look up and out the window and recall that not long ago I was hearing the beat of basketballs on the sidewalk beneath my windows and the happy cries and shouts of the playing neighborhood children, I long for the days to hurry by, even in light of the fact that I know that they do on their own, that in lighter and warmer times I am wishing for them to slow down.

So this is what is coming. Somehow I find myself mired in the thick of it, a woman who feels out of place in her habitat - the cold Midwest - when she should have been plunked down in the ever-warm climes of a beach town. Somewhere a mistake must have been made. Like a zoo polar bear who wakes up to find himself surrounded by cacti, I am not meant for this type of place. And as the bear is trapped, I too feel myself wondering how I can extricate myself from this situation. It is not easy to do, I have found, to just pick up roots and move them somewhere else. Jobs must be found, ties must be broken. That is not easy to do, that is very hard.

But this time of year is wonderful, isn’t it? The evenings are beginning about an hour sooner these days, but there are weeks ahead that will still be okay, perfect. I wish they would slow down.