I was born during the time of year where all the love and warmth from Christmas fades away into winter. Where the light of the sun nearly always meets impenetrable clouds, and when it can pierce through, the air still feels blue-grey like a spiderweb stretched thin, a veil.
I live near the lake now; winter has stretched on and on for three years. I’ve been told that summers slipping into the clear teal water are worth the patience of waiting through the heavy weight of winter, but I’ve betrayed my efforts for two years now, choosing instead to slog back to the thick, boggy air of my hometown. The smell of the swamp burning like it did back in '08, called “stubborn and smoldering. ”It’s almost fitting I chose to go back.
But not this summer. My roots have been willingly pulled up from sandy banks and slushy clay estuaries and now they sit on dense concrete and layers of history I’ve yet to fully unpack. The concrete and asphalt can be hard to see this time of year. Again we enter the extended vestiges of winter, when the heat of the sun reaches skin but not pavement, a loving note to hopefully last us until the winter is fully shaken off in May. Now we wait, as grainy salt is pestled into the ground, turning slate grey what was once a tacky, sticky black.
I’ll watch as I wait, with wind-swept hair and cold chapped cheeks and ears, for my bus every morning, and I'll think of a time I wore darkly striped cotton sweaters in the beating heat of an embracing sun.