Mydwynter:

It’s been an interesting week.

I’ve been sitting here, knowing cerebrally that South Carolina does not get autumn. It seems that it gets slightly…drier, but the temperature and the preponderance of palmetto trees conspire to deny the state a Proper Autumn, with bright colours and crisp smells and chilly breezes.

However, the intertubes have been full of the change of the season this week. A friend posted pictures of the colourful mountain range around her house. Another friend complained lovingly about how it was already too cold in the mornings to stalk around without heavy socks. And I’ve been forced to watch it all from afar, marvelling at the dissonance between the knowledge that I won’t have that here, and the actual experience of lacking it. I’m having the climatic version of taking a sip from a cup that you thought was water, which turns out to be rum. Or, more accurately, I’ve been hoping for spiced rum and got water instead.

I wonder how many times I’ll walk outside and not be slapped in the face by the blustering autumn wind. I’m wondering how many times I’ll go to open the window and smell…nothing. And I’m wondering, more and more, what all this is going to mean for my winter. Is it just going to get worse, as I wait over and over for the snow that won’t fall? Or will I just get used to it, in that way that humans do, and forget that I ever owned a wool overcoat?

Ordinarily I rely on the change of season to spur me on, and the cold weather to keep me moving. The autumn and winter are when I usually get things done, especially all those projects I’d been thinking up in the heat of the summer when I was too lethargic to move. It’s a reaction to the cold and the quiet, I think. It’s a reaction to the juxtiposition of briskness and ice-bound immobility. So how is a lack of winter going to affect my creativity, my productivity? Will everything just remain…stagnant? Where will I find my winter inspiration, if not from the sun on snow?

Many winters ago and several states away, I spent the winter staying in the attic of some friends’ house, sharing the mostly-finished space with another friend. That season I spent the entire time reading Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, listening to my copy of Jethro Tull’s “Songs From the Wood”, and handsewing a gigantic woolen cloak. It was chilly everywhere, but that was the warmest I’d felt in ages. I was surrounded by people whom I loved and loved me, we had a constant supply of hot cocoa, and I was immersed in a very medieval-inspired winter. It feels like every year since then is an attempt to recreate those amazing few months, to no avail; you really can’t go back home again. But at least I still had the cold and the calm.

So, perhaps, this year is the year I invent something else. A new winter. A new zero. Something less reliant on snow and cold, and more derived from an inner quiet. After all, people have to slow down to think sometime, and I hope that even down here–in a humid land full of palmettos and pecans–people still use winter as the season of meditation, reflection, and calm.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 8:26 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.