It’s Season Season

All right, I know it’s cliché to talk about the weather, especially as a Midwesterner, but how can I not? It’s all around us. In many ways, living in a climate with four distinguishable seasons connects you to nature in a way that those practically-perfect-all-the-time places (I won’t name names, because some of my very dear friends live there! But it sort of rhymes with “Valley Morn, Duh”) doesn’t.

You can’t escape the biting chill of winter, no matter how many layers you wear. No matter how thick the walls, you can still hear the howling winds.

And when the sun reemerges in spring, your heart can’t help but sing.

It is fall now, and as a gardener, I always mourn the end of growing season. I watch as the plants I nurtured for months turn brittle and brown. I roast and freeze every vegetable and herb I can to savor over the impending, seemingly never-ending dark phase of the Northern hemisphere. I am not tricked by the glorious display of ochres, corals, and crimsons which are actually signs of the leaves’ demise. Well, okay, I might be dazzled, but I am not fooled.

Happy fall, y’all—I am not.

The country of Finland, no stranger to the depths of winter, was just named the happiest place in the world for the umpteenth time, and their tourism department has responded by developing a Masterclass of Happiness for people to live more like a Finn. I’ve read books about the Scandinavian lifestyle, and when I lived in the Netherlands, I saw some similarities in the Dutch way of living and even adopted some of the ideologies in my own life. Thus, I persuaded my husband to take the course with me, and we’ve completed a couple lessons so far. They have to do with incorporating nature into your every day. Not just for physical exercise, but for mental and emotional well-being. To reconnect yourself to the earth of which you are a part.

As a poet, it’s in my bones to contemplate nature. Whenever my family takes a winter hike (one of my favorite cold-weather activities), I bore them by reciting Robert Frost. I turn phrases of potential poems over in my mind whenever I am out in the world. Just this morning, I heard the start of a line as I snipped my little bright red Thai chili peppers from the plant. So the first part of the class—to immerse your senses in nature—comes naturally to me.

Last week my husband and I went out on our morning walk without technology, as the course instructed us to do. We crunched down the limestone path, tuning our attentions to the tap of the leaves hitting the ground; the flash of squirrels scurrying up the trees, cheeks full of acorns; the laser beam of warm sun striking us through the thinning treetops even as our noses turned pink from the wind sweeping off the river. Fall was wooing me, big time.

An eagle screeched as it swooped over the water, and then it landed on a branch within our eyesight. We stood and stared in silence—that is, until another walker came along and whipped out her phone to take photos.

I tried to write a poem afterwards. It’s sitting in my notebook, waiting to be tended to.

Maybe I’ll get to it in winter.