Changing seasons
I've successfully rearranged my apartment - thus far, lack of nightmares seems to encourage the thought that I've done it in a manner pleasing to the feng shui spirits - and I've started meeting about my classes. I feel like it's time for the leaves to start changing. That's what fall is all about: change and its necessity.
The seasons aren't really very apparent out here. The temperature swing is only twenty degrees from summer to winter, and though the natives seem to think it's cold - they wear parkas and mittens when the mercury drops to the mid-50s - I can't say I notice much of a difference. Tank top and jeans versus tank top, hoodie, and jeans is about it. And somehow it makes it harder to acknowledge the passage of time. I've started to think that Hell is always 75 degrees and sunny...because it makes it that much harder to appreciate good weather when you have it all the time.
In Massachusetts, the fall colors are close to peak. This time of the year at Groton, I was playing soccer and getting ready for sitdown dinner in the evenings. At night the frost was thinly spread over the grass of the Circle, and the stars were starting to revolve to their winter positions. In Chapel Hill, it was warmer, though the maples and the oaks were slowly losing their leaves. On the upper quad, the grounds crew was almost constantly at work rearranging leaf piles. My notebooks were gradually filling with cramped hand writing, and on the weekends I was headed to Kenan Stadium with my blue and white pom poms to cheer on the football team. We were starting to talk about the basketball season, and I was wondering whether the winter would bring another ice storm.
I've been in California a year. And it feels like a holding pattern more than a place itself. I don't have impressions of fall here. The smell of the trees on campus is the same year round. Students are roughly the same looking as they were last year: same longboards down the walkways, same large aviator sunglasses, same messy ponytails. Little here seems to change. I'm one year closer to my PhD, I've managed to find a niche for my days, but I don't feel any wiser or older.
If only it would rain here. If only I could hear that clap of thunder shaking the house, hear the pounding of the rain on my roof, and awake to the smell of morning: fresher, cleaner, damp. A week ago, I woke up to that sound and thought it was a dream. By the time I woke, the rain that had actually fallen had dried up. So it goes here in California: everything is desiccated and bleached dry when you're not really watching. When I last went to church, one of the readings was that beautiful passage from Isaiah 35: "for waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water." And there was a promise in those words that I continue to put my trust in - but I miss the storms and the sheets of rain and the green of the trees.