Growing up in
Wisconsin—land of Easter snowstorms and 70-degree days in mid-January, my body
trained over 24 years to survive windchills in -30Fs and sustained summer heat
waves in the low triple digits—my senses are not finely tuned enough to
appreciate much difference between March and June in San Francisco. There’s a
certain damp chill to the mornings that almost invariably burns off into warm
blue-sky afternoons. I hear the fog patterns vary from season to season, and
that pleasant summer days can turn swiftly from sundress-appropriate to mukluks-and-muumuus
weather.
So I wonder: How will I mark time here,
without pronounced seasons? How many people, events, books, and realizations
have been tagged in my memory with whether the air felt hot and sticky or ungodly
frigid, or fresh and cool after a spring rain, whether the sky was that
blinding October blue or evenly gray or crowded with towering thunderheads, whether
the ground was white or brown and muddy, whether I wound a scarf around my neck
or rued my lightest linens for trapping too much heat?
The first time I realized I loved
so-and-so, it was early spring and the grass throbbed green, and we stretched
out near the bike path and talked about Lacan. The first time I struggled to
balance my sometimes-dueling commitments to human rights and pacifism, I perched
on the low wall behind College Library, overlooking Lake Mendota, which was
steel gray and tossed with waves, blasted by a November wind. I first picked up
Wendell Berry’s works on an October evening so sweet and warm, and as I savored
the words, I savored what I knew would be the last agreeable day in six months.
When I remember the Wisconsin protests, I remember the way the damp February chill
crept up through the soles of my boots and how I stomped-stomped-stomped to
keep the feeling in my toes.
The memories
I’ve made here so far are already hard to place. Oh, on that day, it was sunny and warm, though the morning wasn’t…
and isn’t every day the same?
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