As someone who didn’t grow up with seasons:
These are gently edited excerpts from my journal from fall 2021-present, threaded together by month to share how it’s felt to live and grow in this place. I have noticed how heavily my experiences at Brown have been colored by the novel experience of the changing of the seasons. The light on this coast is different, rich sun dripping wet gold over warm brick, or filtered through pale air over bare and unfamiliar trees at an angle. I’m sure I could grow numb to the turnover of the weather, but I am still a child to this biome, and the way it changes the passage of days and months and years has defined my time here; I am still overcome at every turn.
September
9.29.21 I breathe out completely. The clouds cushion the day. It all comes sweet and easy. I love my tiny universe for its great lushness, the air as crisp as the season’s orchard apples, the last roses of summer still radiant as the first fall leaves blush terra cotta to match the brick, with its cascades of that emerald-waxy ivy. Today I really notice the tartness in the crab apples and how it makes the sweetness taste that much more forgiving. The elegance strikes in waves, and I’m awash, bright-eyed autumn earnestness under a clear and brilliant sky.
9.8.22 I arrive in a cricket-dense dusk, and it feels alive in me, like a viscous syrup poured through my body, leaving my veins heavy and sweet. The warm evening, already heady, becomes completely saturated, and I am dizzy in the fading light.
October
10.6.22 Stepping out into a world of sun, after days of rain and fever, is like life kissing you on the mouth, almost sloppy with joy but not so much as to be off putting. It’s the kind of morning that pairs well with slightly too much coffee, with those gold leaves against the blue velvet sky. I’m reading the words of a woman I’ll never meet who sees the purple morning glories exactly how I do, with the same gravity and the same appreciation of their fleeting beauty.
10.28.22 Today when I step outside the wind chafes my cheeks for the first time all year. October is almost over and it feels real again that the northeast winter is sleeping on the horizon, and that over the next several weeks she will lumber in, flattening the deep blue sky. It feels almost real that I am here, in a bittersweet way, that time is passing indeed and the season did occur, that everything I’ve experienced was real. It felt for a few weeks there like I took a long nap in an overripe afternoon during early September, and that this had all been an intense dream. But now, it’s so clear that it’s all been real and that a new chapter will dawn soon. So I’ll do my best to savor these last few changing trees, especially the vermillion leaves I so love outside the second-floor window of the English building.
November
11.3.21 Moving under ice-clear skies through a harshly illuminated world, leaves trembling with the wind, hands with black coffee. Pale vitality of cold, dry skin, cold, dry, blue air expansive all day long.
11.1.22 Sleep has been like a thick syrup the past few days. It’s been rainy, big wet drops, and unseasonably warm, so I sleep with the window open and the curtain closed.
11.10.22 This is the time in the year where it gets a little harder to hold onto the good. Today, walking up the carpeted stairs of the English department, I saw the leaves completely gone, stripped branches like dark cracks in the clear blue sky. I felt as though something had been taken from me, the drop in your chest that comes with the cancellation of a plan you were looking forward to. Watching those leaves change, checking in on them twice a week, brought me so much peace. Now what?
11.10.22 It’s getting cold. It’s getting dark so early. Yesterday afternoon I lay in bed scrolling mindlessly through my phone as the light filtering in from behind the blinds turned from gold to gray and then, when I woke up an hour later, it was pitch dark outside.
11.12.22 Today, the last warm day, is peace. Iced coffee in the fridge, the new songs of the unknown-to-me winter birds on the porch, my window wide open for the last fresh air. Today is exceptional, a treasure, a nostalgia for something not yet completely realized. The trees are bare but the sky is hot blue with that summertime depth, that spectacular sun of which we only have a few hours left, and so I sit mourning her before she’s all the way gone.
December
12.1.22 There is some grieving in these days, these biting afternoons, the long stretches without free time while the sun is up. This is where it gets difficult, yes. I am happy, it’s just hard sometimes. Things have been gained more than they have been lost, that much I feel sure of. There is so much hope and fear waiting for me, in the coming months and then forever and forever after that.
12.14.22 It’s that time of year again where the air is too cold for my lungs. I’m looking back through the old pictures, so evocative of how I felt in pieces of my past. It feels both very scary and very comforting that this week will dissolve, will become compacted into a mental drawer with all of these months, and the less sparkling days will be filed and shelved away into memory’s vast cabinets. The highlights, of course, will be taped to the door of the cabinet. This was the semester of the morning glories on East Street and the dim pink light in the kitchen window at sunset. My heart will ache for these elements, sometime in the middle future. I already know it.
12.18.22 This is the last time I will leave this place like this, with the intention of coming back to my life there.
January
1.30.22 Radiant experience of everyone around me on a snowy Sunday afternoon, milky light and talking gently in low voices in the library. To be here is to be challenged and to be cradled, to give from myself and to take in what the place will share with me, so the moments of peace are profound. We are a rarity, a precious companionship, side by side in the late afternoon before the early winter sunset.
February
2.1.23 It’s icy and delirious out there today, but there was sunshine coming through my window this morning.
2.10.23 Finally, it’s beautiful. I can take my jacket off in the sun. It rained last night, and this morning the air is balmy with humidity, sweet and gentle with a soft breeze. It’s so much so what I’ve been waiting for. I can hear birdsong from where I’m sitting in the sunlight. The grass behind me smells like spring, like home, lush and alive. For weeks I’ve been noticing the feeling of the frozen ground, foreign as it is to me, and today it’s right again, so spongy and life-giving. The wind caresses my face like a dream.
2.22.23 I remember, sometimes, the quality of the light there, during that fiery August. The sky was orange, sometimes gray. Thick hot light filtered through the haze like it was half-drawn blinds in an oppressive late afternoon. Now, in this dark February, the sky on the verge of snow is that sky’s inverse. It has the same heaviness to it, the same low-hanging density, but it hangs now like a wet navy quilt, lit from below by the lights of the city.
2.24.23 This morning, ivy leaves against damp brick, trepidation and relief and exhaustion and energy tied up together. It’s strange to know that someday I’ll forget what it feels like to live this life, probably someday soon. I want to remember.
March
3.17.23 This is the feeling of the days that I had forgotten the weight of, being swallowed and spit out just to do it all over again before the next respite. The clouds still heavy, unwilling to break, buds secure on the trees, dormant for now but maybe just for a little while longer. There are these bits shining through, the pearly sunrise over the glassy river, the sound of mourning doves that I am suddenly noticing from my bed.
April
4.3.23 The birdsong has ceased to be a rarity on these crystal blue mornings. Small things with small flowers are popping up on my scruffy lawn and in the spaces between pavement. The spring blooms of the Northeast, unbelievable in their early opening and in their delicate fragrant perfection, are catching my eye everywhere: daffodils, hyacinth, narcissus, crocuses, all of them crisp and shapely above the spongy earth.
4.24.22 The leaves unfurling right now are the same ones we will watch fall in six months’ time. October pulses like a fever, like the deep heat of falling asleep, and April is its inverse, the raw bare light of waking up. These new colors are born around corners and over single afternoons and they orient me, define me. The white and purple and yellow outside my window bring me into a poorly defined and potent yearning. It occurs to me as I stand entranced like a child under the dizzying ornamental cherry trees that I might not be so afraid of change if I had grown up somewhere with seasons. I might always crave the stable, ambient pleasantness of California, but I am learning from watching the whole world die, persevere, and come entirely back to life. Ahead will be six idyllic and languid months, before this landscape turns itself inside out all over again.
Meditations steeped in an afternoon drizzle maintain the hazy qualities of the atmosphere. If for a second the clouds drift apart, the sky beyond them looks like a puzzle piece of another lifetime.