Weather and Moves and the East

When I was in high school, my sister introduced me to the work of Lisel Mueller.  JR was reading Mueller's poetry aloud to her love in the family room, and I was in the kitchen.  I wasn't listening intently, until one line snagged my attention and held it: "How do you manage without snow to tell you that you are mortal?"

When language has the power to simultaneously break and mend a heart, it reminds me why I believe in a higher power.

I ended up writing about this poem, "Letter to California," in an English class a year or two later, and I tried to explain what it meant to me by citing a Dylan lyric towards the end of my essay: "Every one of those words rang true and glowed like burning coals; pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you."  What Mueller had articulated was a more mature version of the bewilderment I had suffered since the moment I arrived in the eponymous state: the blithe, satisfied grandeur of California ran directly against my native Midwestern stolidity, and I felt like I was walking into a cultural headwind for four years.  Fish out of water, if the fish were a sad fourteen year old girl and water were a cornfield.

In my time on the west coast, it felt as though the basic, governing laws of the world had changed; if not gravity, then certainly language and especially weather.  My friends referred to "the snow": "Hey are you going to the snow this weekend?"  The snow.  As though it is something sought out at will, enjoyed, and left behind.  That baffled me.  When we were studying Robert Frost, a classmate of mine asked what an ice storm was.  The concept was completely foreign to her.  I would write in a companion poem to my Mueller essay: "The seasons here come in the wrong order / or they do not come at all. / My fingers and the skin on my back / have waited for three years for thunderstorms that do not come."

Mueller, I am not, but I've always been rather proud of that.

In a strange and perfect reversal, we went back to Illinois four years almost to the day after my forcible relocation (yes, I have my suspicions that Pixar ripped off my adolescence for Inside Out; I can't watch it without going into hysterics).  I commented to my sister shortly after we moved that I hadn't had any trouble making the transition back to the Midwest, and she said, "That's because you never left."  While it sounds a little on the nose, I don't actually think she was right.  I think that you just never shake your native language, spoken or otherwise.  I spent that summer basking in the heavy, humid heat and exulting in the thunderstorms from our front porch, beer in hand and heart overflowing with rain water and electricity. 

Some time later, in the dead of winter, I was pulling out of our driveway when I saw a cardinal perched on a bare tree branch across the street.  It looked like one of those Christmas ornaments: a hanging ball covered in red silk so bright that it seems to glow with its own light.  I stopped and stared as all of it-- the poem, the weather, everything—came full circle, since "Letter to California" closes:

"...But we have
our intimations: now and then
a cardinal with its lyric call,
its body blazing like a saint's
unexpectedly gaudy heart,
spills on our reasonable scene

of brown and gray, unconscious of itself.

I search the language for a word

to tell you how red is red."

Like I said, full circle.  At least for that moment.

Eventually I would go east to Boston, a city whose not-New-York-and-we-like-it-that-way stalwartness and extreme loyalty to baseball teams (come what may) reminded me comfortingly of Chicago.  The languages were similar too, though so help me God, I will never refer to sprinkles as jimmies and yes, it will always be pop and not soda.  I was very happy in Boston, but after four years, I struck out west again, this time of my own volition, to supposedly manifest my destiny. 

By now it’s probably pretty unsurprising that it took me less than a year to realize I’d made a terrible mistake, and then one more year to swing my return east exactly the way I had come.  Again, I articulated the moment I knew I was home in terms of weather: stepping off of the bus on the Mass Pike eastbound and breathing in that unmistakably green, humid smell of late spring on the East Coast.  Boston.  Home.  Period. 

After bouncing back and forth across the continental U.S. (Illinois, California, Illinois, New Hampshire, Illinois, Massachusetts, Colorado, Massachusetts) for most of the last fifteen years, I am now confident that I am landed for keeps.  I mean that literally: I actually do now own land in Massachusetts, upon which glorious little plot sits the home I own with my fiancé.  During the week between our closing and our furniture moving, we shuttled odds and ends back and forth between our apartment and our new house.  On one of those trips, as I turned onto our street and passed the softball field, something came home to roost in my chest. 

It was that perfect time of night when the sun has gone down but it's not dark yet, and the light is blue.  In that light, the green of the grass and the trees positively glows.  I was overwhelmed with something akin to déjà vu: I spent nights like this in my childhood catching fireflies in our backyard.  Some time in those years I formulated somewhere in my bones what home meant-- what it smelled like, what it felt like under your feet, how humid the summers and how cold the winters-- and I had, maybe unconsciously, brought myself back to somewhere very similar to make a home of my own.

I was so suddenly overcome by gratitude that I nearly pulled over, two blocks away from the house, from the front porch of which I now listen to the cardinals chirping and watch storms come in with my love.

Hell, maybe all of this is simply a function of my unexpected dependence on humidity and nearly arctic winters.  But I get the sneaking suspicion it’s more than that.  I’m so lucky for so many reasons: I got to have a home and good roots, and I get to make a home and put down new roots here, in a place I chose (and that kind of chose me).  I’m not overly fond of the idea that everything happens for a reason, but sometimes I wonder: among the poems and turnpikes, the thunderstorms and mountain ranges, thousands of miles and a few well-placed cardinals, it seems simultaneously a little too intimate and a little too epic to have ever been an accident.