Beautiful this time of year
It's my newsletter and I'll complain about the weather if I want to
Would you believe me if I told you that Oklahoma is beautiful this time of year?
After 12 years in Los Angeles, I lost all concept of seasons. I lived in a sort of Groundhog Day reality, stepping out my front door to 75 degrees and sunny in both January and July.
In fact, I moved to LA to escape seasons — well, one season specifically: northern California “winter.” Rain, rain, rain from November through February. It’s embarrassing to admit that I had a touch of SAD, even in California, so much so that it drove me south for college. I’ve always been extra sensitive to my surroundings, affected by the smells, sounds, and temperature of my environment more than most. (I write this from my home office, where I am permanently freezing.)
At 18, I left the cool fog of the Bay Area for sunny (sometimes smoggy) LA. It was glorious, if a bit monotonous: every day the same, the only indication of seasons being the bloom of the jacarandas in May, leaving the hood of my Civic covered in purple petals.
When I moved from LA to Tulsa, Oklahoma, a few Decembers ago, I got my first taste of true seasons. There was winter, with its one deep freeze and one or two snow days, for which the city was woefully unprepared. (Snow doesn’t happen often enough for Tulsa to need infrastructure like plowing, so it’s just generally a mess for a few days.) There was summer, with its unbearable heat and humidity. There was fall, a welcome reprieve at the end of a sweltering summer, with its changing foliage and cool mornings. And there was spring, where the bulbs started to sprout up from the soil, blanketing the grounds of the Philbrook, the Gathering Place, and Woodward Park in hyacinths, crocus, daffodils, and tulips.
Something shifted in Tulsa during the one spring I spent there. Despite a fairly mild winter, the vibe of the entire city changed when spring arrived. (You know what else changed? My allergies were HORRIBLE.) We gathered on rooftops and on grassy knolls at the park, having picnics and drinking wine. Everyone was out and about. There was a huge St. Patrick’s Day party, there was Pride, there was Tulsa Tough.
I started going to free outdoor yoga classes at the park one or two nights a week. I remember lying on my mat in the grass in savasana, watching the sky slowly darken as the sun set over the Arkansas River. I think back on it as a near-perfect time, where I’d gotten to know the fabric of the city, made some good friends, and really started to feel at home.
Boston is different.
My therapist says that the weather in Boston is like a bad relationship: it draws you in with picture-perfect New England fall foliage, withholds from you for a long winter, pulls you back in with two stunning weeks of spring, then lets you sweat in your apartment (built anywhere from the 1700s to the 1950s) with nothing but two sad air conditioning boxes teetering out of your windows.
Many of you have checked in on me as you read this newsletter, since I’ve been talking about the weather almost incessantly for the past few weeks. Firstly, thank you — and I promise I’m okay! I’m just feeling the change of the season deeply in my body, in a way that most people probably don’t, shifting from winter into spring.
Spring comes later in Boston, I’ve learned. While everyone else is literally running through fields of flowers in late February — or so Instagram would have me believe — we’re over here shivering until mid-April’s Boston Marathon, which in some strange pattern is almost always the first nice day of the year.
Spring is fully here now, and it’s beautiful and perfect and sunny and blooming, just as I hoped it would be. There is a magnolia tree by our house that leans over the sidewalk, dripping pink and white petals onto the ground below. On my walk every morning down Hampshire Street, there are tulips and daffodils galore, all yellows and magentas and reds and oranges. There are four perfect cherry trees around the corner from our apartment, and one on my walk to and from work. I love to catch them in different light, and especially in the early evening, when the sun filters through their branches dramatically, casting shadows on me as I walk by.
I stop constantly to take pictures, because this time is so short, and I want to remember that after all that waiting, it really did arrive.
I’m re-learning a simple lesson, one that spring comes to teach me every year: after all the waiting comes growth. After restlessness, peace. After uncertainty, a path forward. I spent much of winter looking for a new job, and started a new one this spring. It feels appropriate, if a little cliche, starting something new in the spring.
I spend so much time waiting for the thing, and then the thing arrives, and I’m already waiting for the next thing. Every year, spring comes with its gentle reminder that I’m always both in transit and arriving. I’m in the place I waited for. I’m also, in a very human way, looking ahead to the next thing.
Everything seems to take longer than I wanted to, and doesn’t last as long as I hope it would. A lesson in temporality, maybe — flowers are good at that. Closed, then open, then dying.
As the petals fall to the ground, signifying that spring is ending as quickly as it arrived, I’m taking in every fleeting moment, allergies and all.
Not a croissant:
I made these tahini billionaire bars this week for Tyson’s birthday. They involve a layer of sesame shortbread, tahini butterscotch, and bittersweet chocolate. I can tell you from experience that they are excellent with coffee in the morning or with Cardamaro after dinner.
Congrats on the new job!!!