Winter came in a little uninvited, if I’m honest.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
It was Fall in Portland so recently. The most glorious Fall I’ve ever seen which sounds so grandiose but it’s true, and many others were saying it too. The trees were wild with color and seemed to take their time in dropping their leaves, letting the neighborhood streets become more and more vibrant each day when it seemed as though that couldn’t be possible. The skies were bluer and the clouds were sparse and cartoonish.
One day I crossed a city bridge to see in front of me the most enormous vista of both Mount Hood and Mount Saint Helens, looking bigger than they’ve ever looked before.
I didn’t want it to end.
And then the week of Thanksgiving, even though the stretch of Fall had loitered generously, the earth was suddenly very bare. It felt as if the leaves had disappeared rather than fallen. They were there, then gone. The view out of my kitchen windows was breathtakingly bold, then dull.
At just the same time a languorous cold descended on my household. Isla, my three-year-old, came down with a fever and cough the day before Thanksgiving and by that Sunday it had hit me as well. Nearly two weeks later, I’m still quite congested and forgetting what it feels like to breathe through my nostrils, as we should do always, without effort or discomfort.
How glorious it will be to breathe again.
Hopefully soon.
I was walking to get Isla from school yesterday in my black lululemon rain coat and a knitted beanie hat, marveling at the recent descension of the greys and browns of Winter. “Deciduous” I whispered to myself. I only learned that word this year; The opposite of evergreen. It occurred to me that this is the world I arrived to here in Portland earlier this year. We landed in late-March to cool grey skies and bare trees, donning daily our rain jackets and hats.
We were happy to be here, so happy, and so relieved to not be any longer in our old lives. We were also scared and overwhelmed, having to find a home and buy a car (me) and start preschool (Isla, obviously) all within week or so. I was beginning again with very near to nothing as I learned how to be fully myself again and also a single parent.
It’s bittersweet to look back now at those first days here. I often drive by the airbnb where we stayed those first 9 days and I always marvel at it, that place where we landed, where we felt safe while we figured out the rest, where I cried more tears than any other time in my life. That little apartment with the yellow door was a gift to us.
On the ninth day we moved into the little white house I’d, as a survival tool the previous year, named Evergreen House. After sleeping on an air mattress for a couple of weeks we finally got beds. And then some more weeks later we got a sofa. We unpacked the boxes of what I’d thoughtfully saved from our old life, or my old lives, for much of what I value had come from before I even met my exhusband, back from when I had other joys in my life. My favorite pair of wine glasses that were mine and Colt’s ten years ago. The antique farmhouse dining table I’d bought from a friend-of-a-friend when I moved into my own apartment for the first time, in 2007. We collected new things from thrift stores and local markets, like the little white bell on the door. We received a few gifts from friends and family far away. The blue still life art hanging in my bedroom, the vinyl record player from my brother.
Our house became a home.
The garden next door that our neighbors are so sweet to share with us has filled our kitchen with produce and our tables with flowers. Even now, in the cold, a cauliflower waits for us to harvest it any day. Colt moved here to be near us, and our love, our old and recently dormant love, has found new life. We’ve made friends who gathered just a few weeks ago to sip gin cocktails and toast me for my birthday, who invite us camping, who don’t back away from my easily overwhelming level of vulnerability. These days, for me, it’s that or nothing.
I laugh, easily. When I listen back to my podcast recordings to mark the timestamps for my sound guy, I am delighted at how much I hear myself laugh. How easily. How lightly.
I don’t tiptoe around anyone, afraid of the endless landmines ready to be tripped by my words, my behavior, or having nothing to do with me. I can go for walks without feeling tethered, work for hours without feeling guilty, make decisions based on my knowing and my needs and my desires and those alone. My body feels healthy. My joy feels accessible. My home feels safe. My soul feels tended to. My Self feels seen and heard and loved.
How far, how very far, we’ve come since even those last days of Winter just some months ago.
I believe this is why we have seasons. Seasons move us forward while inviting us to look back. The world isn’t the same and neither are we. Where were you last time the trees were bare? What did it feel like in your body, in your life, as you moved under grey skies the last time they were this grey? What’s changed since then? What hasn’t? What should?
As Winter ends in a few months I’ll celebrate one year here, and all through this season I’ll be reflecting on both what’s next and how far I’ve come. I don’t know that any journey in life will take me as far in just one year (or less) than this one has, and I’m okay with that.
I’ll stay Evergreen a while.
But okay, Winter. I see you.
Welcome.
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