A seasonal affair

Don't judge me because I'm different

I pulled the HappyLight® off the shelf and set it on the kitchen counter.

A friend flew south to spend time in the Caribbean.

I asked a woman I haven’t seen in a while how she was getting on. “Not bad,” she smiled, “But this isn’t my best season.”

Winter. The bleak mid-winter. Just a few days past the halfway mark, and you’re white-knuckling your way through it. It’s a good thing that farkling groundhog predicted an early spring, or you might’ve needed to eat him for dinner.

It’s the waking up in darkness. It’s the coming home in darkness. It’s the cold. It’s the social isolation. It’s the lifeless landscape, the dampness. It’s the gray. The gray. How can anyone maintain a lightness of being when everything is so terribly gray?

Photo by benjamin lehman on Unsplash

I feel for you. I truly do. But I am not one of you.  

I love winter. I appreciate the other seasons, too, and am grateful to live in a place that allows me to experience all four of them. But the warmer the world gets and the older I get, the less I can deny that I’ve got a heart-thing going for Mr. Frost.

Yes, I know. Spring is all fresh and emergent, with greens so green it’s like they’re lit from the inside. The flowers bloom, this part of the earth warms. And every living thing is out there getting it on, including the trees, which involves pollen and means I end up coated in plant sex residue. And the laundry I hang outside, and the surfaces in my house, and the insides of my eyes turn yellow. But it’s okay. Spring is good.  

Yes, of course summer is amazing, because that’s when all the crazy-delicious foods return, like tomatoes, and peaches, sweet corn and green beans, cucumbers, squash, lima beans, figs. That’s when I get to spend time on the water, and in the water. I strip off my layers and let my body soak in real vitamin D, which makes it easier for mosquitoes and ticks to do what they do best, and that totally sucks. Meanwhile, the heat and humidity make me feel like I’m liquifying. But summer is fine.

Fall is actually pretty great. I marvel at how the colors flutter and snap across the landscape like strings of Tibetan prayer flags. The air feels less like mud in my lungs, and I can bake bread and cook pots of soup, and eat local apples, and hope no one brings anything pumpkin spice within a mile of me. I open my windows again, which makes it so much easier for the stink bugs and spiders to find their way inside. So, yeah, fall’s good. Really good.

Then, it’s winter. Finally. After the holidays, which are kind of a season unto themselves, winter settles in and just is. I just am. After months of sprouting and swelling, swiping and swatting, stirring and preserving, I arrive at a place of relative rest. I have time to turn inward. I am called to renew my relationship with myself.

I wonder about the creatures who cannot tolerate the cold, who leave for warmer places, subjecting themselves to the perils of migration. I wonder about the ones who move into hibernation or brumation, semi-conscious in suspended animation. Do these, like me, appreciate the stillness when it arrives, at last?

Contrary to what we’ve come to understand about seasonal affective disorder (SAD), there are studies suggesting that the mood shifts, sluggishness, and feelings of depression in winter are less a product of lightness and darkness and more the result of how we view this time of year. That is to say, SAD is real, but not for the reasons we might presume.

For years, the farmers market defined my seasons. From February through October, the focus was on growing and selling. Compared to some, I had it easy. The operation was relatively small, and the property mortgage was not my burden to bear. Still, the pace was practically relentless. Winter offered downtime, a gathering in, the opportunity to focus on family, to breathe. Winter was what gave me the strength to pick it all up again the following season. That’s probably when my love affair began.

I see a lot of farmers this time of year, in meetings and Zoom calls. Sometimes I ask if they’re ready for spring. While they all do what they do with a passion only another farmer can fully comprehend, they all also give me essentially the same response:

“Not quite yet,” they say.

And the look in their eyes tells me that they’re still savoring a quieter time, when their jobs ask slightly less of them.

Right now, when I gaze out at the landscape, or I home in on my somewhat simplified life, I don’t see darkness or limitation. I don’t feel sadness. I see restoration. I feel healing.

~Elizabeth