44: on coming home in the spring

Something happens to me near the end of April where, for a rare couple of weeks, I feel like I have nothing but time. The days move slowly, so slowly that I get ahead of myself. My calendar is blissfully (also frighteningly, as a freelancer) empty, and then May arrives, and it’s like someone turned life back on. I think this is because, after the winter in New England, we still have this grueling period of about two months (spring) when it is not particularly nice out, even if it seems like it should be.

I just started an eight-week fiction writing workshop at Little Nice Workshop (highly recommend checking out if you’re in the area and interested in writing, music, or one of the other creative practices they have classes on). I was listening to someone else in the class talk about this seasonal transition as we said hello and introduced ourselves. They explained it by saying we’ve had some days that were warm but rainy, and others that were cold but sunny, but none that have been exactly nice for being outside. I nodded as if I experienced it, even though I haven’t been here for the last five weeks. If you live in New England, you know that it isn’t until sometime near the end of June when we get the combination right with consistently warm and sunny days (when it comes to weather here, there’s actually no consistency at any time of the year). The outdoor things that I love to fill my days with, like the beach and bike rides, are mostly off the table until then. So, April is a limbo month where I spend a lot of time inside reading, tinkering on my website, and trying to find new work for the rest of the year. Once in a while, a nice day comes out of nowhere and reminds me that life is just around the corner, but not before a few more weeks of cold rain.

For some reason, my body has not adjusted to the relatively simple 5-hour time difference from Morocco, and I am waking up every day between 3 and 4 am. I had a teacher once in middle school, a sort of salty, older woman with NPR mugs, stacks of old National Geographic magazines, and a Prius, who mentioned to us in passing that she often got up at 3 am simply because she’d wake up and couldn’t just lie there doing nothing. When we asked what she did, she listed off the normal things that anyone might do at reasonable hours of the day: laundry, read, tend to plants, and clean the house. That one moment has basically stuck with me for over 20 years now, and if I wake up at any time in the night and can’t fall back to sleep within 5-10 minutes, I’m up for the day. I mention this because I’ve fallen into a pattern of rebuilding my life in the spring, and this year it seems especially hard. Not sleeping has sort of felt like a superpower that’s expanded my days to do things like search for jobs, replace the car that was totaled four months ago, make new work with friends, shoot some really fun assignments, and walk around my neighborhood, where I sometimes forget I live.