Landscape

Inside of us, there’s a continual autumn. Our leaves fall and are blown out over the water. ~Rumi

Yesterday I awoke feeling under the weather, the cold I’d been fighting all week finally taking root.  It was the perfect excuse to spend the day reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s new book, “The Lowland.”  In this, the geographies of Kolkata, Rhode Island and southern California have a significant role.  Defined  by circumstance and individual choice, each character’s solitude evolves or dissolves in response to a specific landscape and the unique population (of wildlife, people, ideas) it supports.

This feature of her novel stood out because I’ve been experiencing a mid-life crisis of sorts around geography – not of culture, but of place.  What’s more, autumn is a particularly hard time for me because it is my favorite of the seasons, and San Francisco’s fall lacks the drama of  midwestern Octobers.   The first 30 years of my life were spent in Ohio and Minnesota; there, the distinct pattern of the seasons is immutable.  This natural cycle defines everything, most obviously the food we eat, but beyond that, how we spend our time, where we put our energy and resources.  Autumn’s bittersweet arrival portends greater things to come:  there is nothing like the silence and exhilaration of the first snow, and I love the starkness of  bare trees silhouetted against a winter sky.  Spring can make the most stoic of us believe in miracles, all that bright new life painting the world. By instinct and design, I moved through this cycle in tandem with the earth, taking for granted this essential process.

Little did I know when I relocated to San Francisco how disorienting the seasons of this geography would seem.  After 15 years here,  I still can’t shake my confusion.  The bougainvillea growing on the front of the house blooms year-round.  The scorched heat of California’s long summer creates golden hills in the distance, but fog cloaks my neighborhood almost daily July through September, leaving summer obscured.  In October, just as I am coming to welcome the fog, balmy days arrive,  and then November bursts into green – green! – as the rain consumes us for the winter.  Even January, notoriously the darkest month of a midwestern winter, is not without its golden days.  These are the seasons of California — or more specifically, of San Francisco — and I am still not accustomed to them.  They too have their own immutability, but it’s mild and subtle.  They too define the food we eat and how we spend our time.  I still own hats, winter coats, mittens — and wear them here all winter, claiming to be “freezing.”  But they still don’t feel right.

When I visited San Francisco for the first time, I was struck by how integrated the outdoors are with daily life.  Those midwestern seasons, in their severity, often meant we were bolstered against them — by heat, shuttered windows, air conditioning.  Fresh air was a thing belonging to short-lived spring and autumn.  In California, fresh air is abundant and available year-round.  Flannel sheets stay on the bed all year, but my window nearby stays open, too (rarely letting in bugs, and never mosquitoes!) These are the most perfect of sleeping conditions, hard to come by in the midwest, and a daily pleasure here.   There is always something blooming, bright and colorful, softening city living by keeping nature ever-present.   But I feel removed from the deep experience of the earth’s changes when they are so easy to endure.  There is no hardship or inconvenience  in mild days, and I feel unmoored by this lack of delineation.   Maybe it’s because I live in the city, a place I never imagined I would call home.  Maybe it’s because I live in San Francisco, known for its peculiar weather and unlike any other place on earth.  If only I could embrace this climate as a force of nature, I might finally accept its cycles as perfect by design, too.