I figured it out

The S.A.D. truth about Autumn
Sick for Spring
An Oregon Day
I've moved to Ohio

I've been mulling it over, stewing about it, and generally obsessing about what it could possibly be that makes me so sad when Fall rolls around (not all the links above are about autumn, but there is a similarity to them nonetheless). I stumbled upon the answer the other day, and I was shocked by how easy it turned out to be. I'm actually embarrassed at it's simplicity. Why didn't I figure this out before?

I've fussed and written numerous posts about it, I've spent more than one 45 minute commute in a dizzy, distracted fog of curiosity. Is it the trees? Is it the way the air looks? What is it?!

I've posted about trick-or-treating, walking to school, the trees in the park at the end of the cul-de-sac where I grew up . . . why didn't I realize this sooner?

It IS homesickness.

Wha-wha-what? you ask. It's true. The feeling that I've been trying to describe and have realized is simply melancholy, is mainly due to plain and simple homesickness.

I was thrown off because every day I live with a certain level of homesickness, and I assumed by now I would be desensitized. I even mentioned homesickness as a possibility one of my posts, but I'm such a doofus I didn't think about why the autumn makes me more homesick than usual.

It hit me the other day, and it was a revelation.

The heartbreakingly blue skies look like Oregon. Autumntime in Ohio looks almost exactly the same as an Oregon autumn. The other seasons in Ohio are wildly different from what I am familiar with (there's nothing Oregonesque about 12 inches of snow or 99 percent humidity, trust me).

But autumn. Lovely autumn. I step outside in the crunchy air, drive through showers of fallen maple leaves, look up at the cloudless sky, and I could be anywhere. I could even be back home. I stare at the sky, rejoice in the turning leaves, and for a moment I am in Oregon.

Then the moment passes and I realize I am not. It's okay, since this is my new home and I love it with all my heart, but still . . . sometimes it comes as a shock and I feel very displaced from where I grew up. Very far away. It makes me ache.

Anyone who has ever had a dull, constant pain knows that you eventually learn to live with it. But in the autumn I'm constantly going back and forth, constantly catching myself thinking "It looks just like it does 'back home.' "

And that makes me think about how all my life my grandmother has referred to Maryland as "back home." I always thought that was silly. Grammy would say, "It's really hot back home!" or "It's snowing back home!" I thought, "How long does a person have to live somewhere to stop referring to the place they grew up as 'home'?" Then I moved to Ohio, and I learned the answer for myself.

Even though I have only lived in Ohio for two years, I still know the answer is "You never stop." I will always and forever refer to Oregon as "back home."

Autumn is the most beautiful and the most passionate time of year to me; the homesickness doesn’t make me love it any less. The leaves are so red even the air smells like fire.

I close my eyes and breathe in the thin air. The air that could so easily be the air in Oregon. I can't tell the difference. For a moment, I let myself forget where I am.

The S.A.D. truth about autumn

Yesterday was the first day that I really noticed it's getting dark earlier.

The lightning bugs are gone, the mornings are cool and foggy, and I saw a little girl waiting for the bus at the end of her driveway when I was driving to work . . . it's autumn.

There's something about this time of year, and I can't quite put my finger on it, but it makes me sad. As a painfully late bloomer, I never really looked forward to school, but that isn't really it.

Part of me, a very small part, almost wishes there could have been a separate school for all of us late bloomers. At least then we would have stuck together. I'm not the only one out there that had a horrific adolescence, am I? Not because of a traumatic event, not because I was Phoebe Buffay living in a box in New York . . . no, I just had a growth-spurt and was cursed with being born in a Bad Fashion era. Trust me, for a five foot six, 95 pound 12-year-old . . . that was enough. Even I thought I looked like hell. Why did the 80's and 90's have to be the spandex and tight Jordache jeans period?

Despite having a horrible school experience from grades 7 - 9, my sad feeling this time of year has nothing to do with school. As far as I can remember, those first couple of days when I look outside at 8:00 at night and the sun is gone, almost gone, or long gone . . . my heart breaks a little bit. I think about Halloween and orange plastic pumpkins and my Cookie Monster costume. Or walking to elementary school on freezing cold mornings and watching my breath purl in front of me--sometimes I turned my head to the side or blew out of the corner of my mouth so I wouldn't walk through it. I don't know why. Because it looked like smoke, maybe?

I think about the park at the end of our cul-de-sac, and how come winter I knew it would look like a parade of the dead. Lonely skeletons with their heads bent together like a huddle of cadaverous bullies. The funny thing is: I was never scared of those trees. Or rather, I was not scared to go outside at night. Which is not to say I would have gone for a jaunt through the park at midnight.

So what is it? What makes me look outside and see a sky that is so crisp it sucks the air out of my lungs? Some days in Ohio, especially in autumn, there is such an Oregonness in the air. I've had trouble describing before.  I wonder if I'm just feeling homesick?

Could be, because I am, but I don't think that's it. There's a poignancy in the Fall that almost overwhelms me. Wearing sweaters for the first time in months. Pulling out seasonal decorations for the first time in months. You're doing things for the first time in a long time, but still it's the beginning of the end.

The End of the Year. Perhaps because so much of my life has revolved around school, I don't think of "the calendar year" as January 1 through December 31. The "calendar year" to any schoolkid is September through June. From June to September is FREEDOM!

Is that it?

I think it might be, but still . . . Still! It's more than that. As a kid it meant homework, lockers that smell of lunchmeat and wet coats, boring classes, the never ending nag of "Do well in school or you won't get into college and your life will be ruined." Now as an adult it's the culmination of the memory of schooldays added to the winding down of summer in exchange for a slow winter of crapola weather, tight pants from lack of activity and home cooked meals, jeans in a constant state of dampness, bulky winter coats and inside-out umbrellas.

Autumn is definitely bittersweet to me . . . I maintain that it is my favorite season, certainly it is the most beautiful, but some days have an emptiness to them, and I just feel so S.A.D.*

I can't decide if was making a joke there . . . I really do feel down, but I've always thought S.A.D. was bunk. It can rain for weeks on end and it doesn't bother me at all. But in the autumn, there is a piercing stillness in the orange air and hazy mornings that stills my heart. The brilliant red leaves cling bravely, waiting, breathing their last frozen breaths until at last, unable to carry on, they let go. I think the world is dying.

And then there are those evenings that happen every once in a while when everything, even the air, looks like it's coated with gold, and you feel like you're swimming in a flaxen sea of sighing maple leaves. Everything seems to hang in the air longer than it should, and when you look down upon yourself you expect to see glitter on your skin.

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*S.A.D. is a very common term in Oregon, but I haven't heard it much since I moved to Ohio. In case you're not familiar with it: Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Sick for Spring

I was driving home from work the other day, trying to put my finger on something. It was bugging me so much, and this has come up before: sometimes there is something about the day, or maybe the sky, that makes me feel like I'm in Oregon. But what is it?

It has something to do with the cloud cover, and the look of the grass. Maybe part of it is because it's been so cold and snowy, and then finally it warmed up enough for the snow to melt, so I was seeing the grass for the first time in weeks? I don't know, but I felt so homesick I wanted to cry. So I spent the rest of the drive home looking at everything and trying to pinpoint what it is I'm noticing.

I think it's the sky and cloud cover.

The clouds were covering the entire sky, but weren't the thick cloud cover that you get so much in Oregon. You know, those clouds that are black and dark and layers upon layers deep? Those dark clouds scream Oregon, of course, but every once in a while in Oregon after we've had day after day after day of thick, depressing clouds, a day will pop up where the clouds are a little bit thinner. They almost look like cotton candy, except right near the horizon you can actually see the sky. It was about 5:00 when I was driving home, the sun was on it's way down, but you could see pink all along the horizon. And it was still daylight, or at least dusk.

And all across the sky full of those cotton candy clouds, there were random places where the clouds were so thin that you could almost--almost!--see the blue.

I think that's all that it was that made me so homesick . . . when those Hint of Blue days pop up in Oregon, everyone starts getting Spring Fever. It rains so much more there, when Oregon finally gets a little tease of blue it's a big deal. And usually, when that wonderful day comes, it's the herald of Spring. Unlike here in Ohio . . . we could still have two more months of winter! I don't think I'll ever get used to potentially having snow in April.

I read a phrase in one of Diana Gabaldon's books (I forget which of the Outlander series, but I'm trying to appropriately credit my source here, so give me a break). It kept popping up in my head on this drive home when I was trying to figure out why I was so homesick. The character in the book was homesick, and talking about the scenery. I don't recall exactly what the character was looking at--good grief does it even matter to anyone but me?--but I think it was the green hillside or something, and the line was something like, "[Seeing the hills] makes me sick for Scotland." It was the sick for Scotland part that kept rolling around in my little brain (and I know I have that right, Diana!). I just love the simplicity of that line, and I so wanted to make it apply it to me. But the alliteration is what makes it work so well: sick for Oregon just doesn't sound the same. And unfortunately using Oregon is the only way it works for me: to say I'm sick for some-city-that-starts-with-an-S just doesn't encompass my feelings. I thought about it all the rest of the way home, and I never could quite get it right. But, if you'll note the title of this post, I did my best.

An Oregon Day

Today was a very Oregon Day.

The temperature was in the 50's, it was overcast . . . a very welcome change from the freezing-butt cold of the past few weeks. It was a one-coat day (rather than my usual 3 coats!). And a one-pair-of-pants day, too.

It really made me miss home though. And I'm not looking forward to the storm that is undoubtedly on its way (probably as I type). You know, the whole "Calm before the storm" idea. It's probably because I wrote that entry where I was all excited about the impending spring.

So it got all nice and warm and then it will hit me just when I least expect it.

Not that it's really that warm. I just mean, in comparison to how it's been: in the single digits! Guess it wouldn't hurt to check the forecast . . . Hmmm. They're forecasting 62 tomorrow. But snow by the weekend. It's coming, I know it is.

Did I already say I can't wait until spring?

Blake and pumpkins are both orange!

Today was another Pumpkin Day. I love the fall so much . . . just when I think it can't get any better, the trees brighten to a redder shade, and the oranges start to come out, and there's a crispiness to the air that makes me remember things like walking to school with my Esprit bag and learning about pilgrims and turkeys and Christopher Columbus.

Dan had his hockey game today, and the whole way there and back we talked about the kids we're going to have. We talked about how we're going to raise them, and how funny it is that any child of ours will undoubtedly have the most bizzare dietary habits of anyone either of us have ever known. We decided that one rule will be that if we cook something and they don't want to eat it, then that's fine but they have to make their own nutritious substitute. Vegetables will be a big deal in our house, so hopefully our kid doesn't take up opposition to that. Veggies are the one thing that neither Dan nor myself are picky about, although I think I enjoy a larger variety of vegetables than he does.

It was fun talking about the kids we're going to have someday, even though I don't especially like the thought of the surgery I have to have first. And whenever we talk about children, we say kids-plural, but I am only game to carry one in my body, so we SHOULD be saying kid-singular. But I guess we've already got 3.5 kids (Gazelle, Blake and Bunny are the 3. We have basically lost custody of Dotty, but we have visiting rights, so she is the .5), so maybe we should just say kids-plural after all. Our orange child is sacked out on the couch right now as I type this; he is so cute. He has flattened the puffy pillow backing on that part of the couch, and his little paws stick out over the edge. He looks like a kid that has just fallen asleep after gorging on Halloween candy. All he needs is a candy wrapper under his cheek and milk dud stuck to his butt to complete the picture. I swear, he's smiling!

The only disappointing thing about living in the country is that since neighbors are so few and far between, we won't have any trick or treaters (unless the kids from across the street come over). I have such strong memories of Halloweens at Laura Court -- it's something I always assumed I'd get to do when I have my own house. I remember standing behind Daddy as he opened the door for zillions of trick or treaters, and the way we always used to keep track by tallying each person on a piece of paper taped next to the door. We had so many people come by! And I remember the year Scott scared those girls because he was playing dead on the porch swing; that was the first year he didn't go with me door to door. I remember stuffing myself into the Cookie Monster costume for as many years as physically possible. And going to Eastwood in my witch's costume. So I'm really sad that we won't have any trick or treaters, and I'm really sad that I won't be able to take my kids trick or treating. Well, I take that back.

Maybe Halloween will become the traditional time to visit Grandma and Grandpa in Oregon!

I've moved to Ohio!

Funny how it took about 3 months to really feel like I've moved.

I don't know what it was today, but it really hit home that Dan and I live together, and we're not in Oregon. We got up and just had a lazy Saturday morning. Dan got up pretty early and went over the finances and activated our new joint credit cards, and I stayed in bed. We dinked around for a while, then decided we better go to Medina to pick up his shoes from the shoe repair shop. PS: This picture is one I took from the car.

Medina is about 20 minutes away, and something about the day gave me a really strong feeling. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what I was feeling, but it was definitely something. I know part of the story needs to be the word poignant, but that's an adjective to describe how powerful the emotion was, but not what the emotion was exactly. Ah ha, a dictionary to the rescue. What I really wanted was the noun version of poignant: I wanted to say there was a vivid poignancy to the day and in the air around me.

I think it's the fall weather. It's always been my favorite season, and I've never really been able to put my finger on exactly why it's so moving to me. But the red trees, the blue sky, the chilly air . . . it makes me feel very alive. And something about today was so autumn, so pumpkiny, it went all the way down to my bones. And to be with Dan, going about our regular lives which is my new life--I finally got it that I live here.

It is a good thing, but it makes me almost cry.