Oh, Winter
Some thoughts on the solstice and loving where you live
Today is the solstice. I always feel like I should have some deeply spiritual way to experience and mark the solstice. But most years I get so wrapped up in daily life I barely remember it’s the solstice and that’s what’s happening to me so far this year.
I’m sitting upstairs on the futon in my attic study. I see light through the windows on either end of this room, not exactly bright light but the promise of light, winter sunshine rather than gray. It’s not particularly cold out. It will be 34 degrees today and it’s going to be a lot warmer when we get to Christmas. I see snow on the edge of my neighbor’s roof, but it doesn’t especially feel wintry out there. Still, this morning when my friend told me her husband got a job in Hawaii, I felt envy, and I’ve been feeling envy of people I know and even people I don’t know who live in Hawaii or other warm places, like LA or San Diego or Florida. And I’ve been thinking about the times when I was in those places. Hawaii, especially.
Hawaii is beautiful, I imagined saying to my friend whose husband got a job there, but the spiritual vibe there isn’t any more elevated than anywhere else. I thought of a moment when I was in Hawaii in 2016, when my ex’s daughter paid my way to go with them because although my ex and I had broken up by then and he was married to someone else and I really had no connection with him, his kids still liked me and they wanted him to have someone to spend time with so they didn’t have to spend it with him while we were there; they didn’t tell me the latter but I figured it was true. Anyway, they paid for me to go and I did and I wrote an essay about it afterwards. The essay is published in my collection, The Deep Limitless Air, and the memory of the essay exists inside my mind beside the actual memory of the trip: I think of driving in the rental car with my ex in Maui and him going on and on about some paranoid political idea and me looking out the window and seeing the houses and the many beautiful blooming red hibiscuses and one of those turquoise roosters strutting and crowing into the warm air, and thinking it doesn’t really matter where you are, you can still spoil it with your thinking.
Still. The warm air, that’s what I love in those places in winter, the flowers and the palm trees and the green ocean and the white sand on the beach. I envy people who get to live with those things and be around those things every day. Of course I know that I don’t really want to move to one of those places, that I love this place with its familiarity and its feeling of home and I’m stuck here because I love it. I’ve stayed here for all these years because of that and because I didn’t know where else to go or have money to move and I was so wrapped up in the ins and outs of daily life I never had time to move, I just stayed and stayed where I was and now I’m too old and still too poor or whatever to move. Plus, I’m not just stuck. I love it here. The sadness of leaving this place would be unbearable. I love my upstairs study, I love the quiet interior sense I have in winter, I even love the cold. And I’m not just trying to talk myself into loving it. I am trying to talk myself into it but it’s also true. And what I don’t love I’m learning how to love.
