Whatever the Weather
A devotion to this season of life, and also of bringing a light jacket, just in case.
It’s been 10 months since the start of our great American experiment. My husband and I are fully situated in our new city, with new jobs, and friends, and hobbies, and grocery stores, and still the only thing I want to talk about is…the weather.
The weather. The most mundane, get-out-of-jail-free card conversation topic. How f****ing boring.
But…
Oh! The weather!
These beautiful, exalted blue skies! The warmth of a true sun! Late afternoon purple cloud bank, building powerfully over the Rockies, tension only barely releasing with a smattering of hot rain on hot pavement! The wind! The light! The spring!
I hope that will be sufficient to keep me from tearing barefoot down our apartment fire escape onto the street whenever the weather shifts, because even the slightest change in temperature, light, and wind stirs up all this crazed nostalgia, a Midwestern-heavy memory silt I didn’t know I had in me.
Until summer strikes, I’ll be living somewhere between present and far past.
We landed in Colorado in late last July, high, hot summer, that made us melt. Autumn was a fevered rush that refused to cool until sometime in January, and winter is probably the season I associate most with the US since I first moved in Ireland in 2016, anyway. Our annual trips stateside took full advantage of the Christmas break, making winter familiar, even this first one from our new apartment in a new city.
It wasn’t until early March, when one of the first genuinely warm, bright days forced us from our living quarters to the local park suddenly packed with young families, dogs, and Yeti coolers, that I felt it. What was it? Just…something fresh.
Of course, this is spring’s whole schtick, right? Renewal, rebirth, damp soil, swollen buds bursting forth from green tree limbs, all the rest of the vaguely sexual innuendo that goes along with it?
But spring in Dublin always felt (and sorry, Dublin, no offense) like a little bit of a letdown. Although the leaves turned golden and fell away sometime in November, the Irish grass stayed green year-round, tree trunks mossy. Eventually, the days would lengthen, but the air would stay chilly.
There was a sense of waiting without release. I’d pack my sweater and my jacket with me for a singular May pint on a patio before having to turn inside once the sun went behind the rooftops. Then, suddenly, I’d suddenly look up from my desk and realize it was the middle of summer, a roasty 23 degrees Celsius, and I’d be desperately clawing at the windows – at least, for a day or two, until an inevitable week of rain would come barreling through the city and I’d be tramping across the streets muggy and hot and damp and frustrated. …that reads like some sexual innuendo too. In between milky late winter and Irish summer, where the hell was spring?
This year, spring has been – and I apologize, because I can only express this like a total and complete fucking sap – a gift. After a long, hard, busy winter, spring has been brightness without searing, warmth without melting, rain without freezing.
I can hardly put into words what this season is doing to me. It operates on some kind of intuitive, animal level, a place inside that is acutely tuned into shadow play and the feeling of the sun on my shoulders. I’ll be walking to the gym and the way the light hits at that exact 2 p.m. angle will stop me in my tracks. Even the way the soil smells is familiar.
I worked hard at making Dublin my home, and, overall, I think I did an okay job. I know that because these are not sensations or feelings or memories I missed while I was there. But in the end, I didn’t realize how much I missed home until I returned to these small moments.
Maybe this spring is so meaningful because it’s been nearly a decade since I was reminded of how meaningful this season once was. Our late afternoon cloud coverage reminds me of coming home from school, how the grey-green-lavender of sky-grass-lilac heralded the gentle, downslope laxing of homework, graduation parties, summer vacation beyond that.
Archetypically, this is the season of rebirth, but to me, it feels more like I’m moving in a gentle circle, back to the places I’ve already been.
The Me’s keep coalescing. At times, I can’t tell whether I’m Zoe Now, sitting in my dining room with my Irish husband in Denver, Colorado, who drank Guinness and rode Dublin bus for 8 years, or Zoe Then, pretending to be Harriet the Spy with my composition notebook, dreading 4th grade fractions and my post-Simpsons bedtime. How strange that everything outside is the same; it’s only me that’s changed.
If there is anything to be gleaned from this entirely nonsensical and saccharine dispatch it’s simply this: I am happy to be home.
Weekly Rankings
In honor of my annual Yearly Rankings, I’m proud to introduce Weekly Rankings, merely because I like talking about the things I like. Enjoy!
1. Trader Joe’s Dill-icious Chopped Salad Kit
I find salad kits to be just in general a highly convenient and delicious lunchtime choice. I haven’t met a salad kit I haven’t liked, but the TJ’s Dill Pickle one is tops. Also, you can ADD MORE PICKLES to it!! Also, why haven’t I swapped chips for croutons until now? Oily potato-y bits of crisp or nuggets of stale bread that threaten to rip the top of your mouth tooth to tongue? It’s a rhetorical question.
2. Girls5eva
Extremely cute and very funny, Girls5eva has that quintessential Tina Fey-ness that somehow expertly balances pop culture references and actual comedy. Extra points for the shock-awe experience of realizing THEE SARAH BAREILLES stars.
3. Hiring an Actual Adult to Manage Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry??
I recently read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire for my podcast Broken Spine Social Club, which obviously necessitated a watch of all 8 films. I was never a Harry Potter-“head”, but I can’t deny their nostalgic comfort, EXCEPT when Albus Dumbledor just openly derides Slytherin House?
At the end of the first movie (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone), Slytherin is in first place for House Cup or whatever. Like, Dumbledor FULL ON announces they’ve won, the hall is all decked out in green and silver…then, because he’s just like, bullying these literal 11-18 year old CHILDREN, he deus ex machina’s the shit out of the entire honor system of this stupid award and grants Harry / Ron / Hermione / Neville (all of Gryffindor) enough points to JUST beat Slytherin.
Like…it’s just cruel?? These are children??? Why even have a House devoted to evil if you feel that way??? Idk get a real adult in that school.
I absolutely love your writing!