WEATHER COMMUNION

Seasonal Disorder: Affected Embrace

You know you are well into the seasonal adjustment when you are articulating how hard it is—to yourself, in public—and then a storm takes down a lot of leaves and you remember a feeling akin to an annual pilgrimage, a touchstone you have laid your fingers on, annually, for all the years extending back that you have trace memory of, and the ah ha comes, again. I have been here before, this place where I am neither fully in the season that is upon us, nor back in the one past. This is most distinct with the physical advent of Fall.

No matter that the solstice falls on the same date each annum, it’s truly the communion of our bodies with the weather—a weather which runs to its own drumming time, a rhythm that our bodies and minds seek to be in tune with. For all its difficulty of adjustment, it is a transitory experience when we are suspended in that in between place, both inside and outside, which we will transcend—a very satisfactory conclusion to our physical and mental acceptance of the cold, our preparations completed—the heating system turned on, the radiators bled (for us lucky ones without central air), the booties found, and on and on until the pleasure of Fall takes hold of us.

I sit here before a three foot square window covered with drips sliding down or clinging in place, a skim of water forcing the eye to take in the scene in a pointillist perspective. Bits of color signifying the leaves, trunks and grasses; the house like a flat backdrop on an opera stage set to this interpretation of nature. I want this color, this damp cold, the wetness the flora so need, to be my need, too.

Essay by Rosie Dempsey