Seasons 2023: A Monthly Journal

January is snowy, with an inkling of ice. My close friend, writer Mark Spitzer, dies from cancer this January. Too much grief and the heart begins to freeze.  During brief thaws, I find myself sobbing about the loss, the losses, and how growing older requires stamina for grief.

I’m on driving restriction because of the Grand Mal Seizure I had in November.  My work colleagues give me lifts to campus.

February is icy, for sure, with a smattering of snow. Natalie’s birthday is in February, which makes her an Aquarius.  She’s an autistic trans Aquarius whose birthday is usually ruined by ice storms and frigid temperatures. 

She says when she turns 50, she wants to celebrate someplace with beaches and sun.  I tell her I am her Beach and her sun.  She clarifies, “I mean I want to go to some place like Hawaii.”  Oh.  I’m certainly not Hawaii. 

I ask Tallie to take leave from her job because I need her to drive me around. My colleagues have too much happening in their own lives to go out of their ways for me. They don’t say this, of course. But I can see it.

March is windy, and the winds blow in stronger each year. I tried keeping a plastic greenhouse anchored near the compost bins, but it blew away the first March we were here.  Our house is situated by a nature preserve, and the house and the preserve sits up high, back just a bit from the edge of a bluff that overlooks the Mississippi River.  The strong winds took out my greenhouse and mangled our metal gazebo.  

It’s too windy for anything and it can also be brutally cold, bone chilling cold, or mild and warm. March is a gamble. 

This March, my dear friend Anne-Marie and her fabulous daughter, Ripley, visit us from Austin, Texas. They’re not used to the dreary cloudy and cold March weather.  I give Anne-Marie my teddy bear coat, because it’s too small for me and it’s cozy.  She needs something cozy in this Midwestern chill. I’m tender with Anne-Marie because she’s recovering from surgery. She’s fighting breast cancer and we’re scared. 

I try to recall spells and regain my witchcraft magic to cure her. I smother her in smoke from sage. We indulge in magical thinking. I understand why people are religious now. It is comforting to believe.

April brings the first signs of spring. April gives us a warm sunny day here or there. Still the winds whip fierce, and I never quite know when to start transplanting seedlings outside.  Flowers start to bloom. Daffodils and violets trumpet to us it is time to sow.

May is cold, warm, warmer, lovely. More flowers poke their heads up from the warming soil, the oak leaves open, the canopy turns green. The snakes come out. Mayflies start to bite. The wasps establish territory.  

I am a May child, on the cusp of Taurus and Gemini.  Sometimes I’m stubborn as a mule and other times I’m mercurial.  This year I stubbornly wanted to visit Seattle and Spokane.  So that’s what we are doing.  Tallie finally meets my friends Tina and Darrel, who give us the first-class tour of Spokane.  We take Amtrak home and both my earthy and my airy desires are sated. 

I’m a Boomer – Gen X cusper, too. I turn 60 in 2024 so I have booked a room in a Sybaris hotel for my 60th birthday.  Sybaris Suites, located outside of Chicago, has rooms with full-sized pools inside them.  I’m going to spend my 60th birthday immersed in water for 24 hours and emerge reborn. At least that’s the plan.  It’s no Hawaii. 

May is full of smoke from Canadian fires. 

In June the clematis bloom purple and yellow and white. In June, the baby turkeys are escorted by their parents to our feeders for the first time.  In June, the lettuce is ready to harvest, the peppers start to bloom, the coneflowers reach to the sky.  

Our friends Wendy and Terry make our place a stop on their current adventures.  They visit at prime flower time, so they are able to soak up the beauty of our property and town. Did you know Alton is the most haunted small town in America? 

My driving restriction is lifted and I feel free again.  Natalie returns to work.  

I spend the bulk of June inside at a computer. The National Endowment for the Humanities bankrolled a digital humanities project for a Faulkner website and I – along with several other educators – am working on digital curriculum for the website.  I’m also teaching a synchronous online class.  I’m really beginning to miss the tactile, the IRL. I’d rather be gardening. 

Canadian fires send more  waves of smoke here. We decide not to set up our above-ground pool.  It’s too smokey.  Natalie is back to work and I am afraid to swim alone. I have seizure PTSD.

July is full of fireworks and heat.  Our dog, Buddy Guy the Dawg, hates the fireworks so this year I bought a thunder shirt for him.  It doesn’t work, and so I spend our nation’s birthday hugging Buddy as the neighbors throw their annual 4th of July block party.  

July is the last breath of escape before I return to campus for another semester of chairing and teaching. We see the Barbie movie in a movie theater.  I haven’t been in a movie theater since before Covid. It’s cool and dark and a nice escape from the July heat. We love the movie. 

I take my friend, Lynn, to the Missouri Botanical Gardens to see the Chihuly installation. The gardens are good for the soul. I wish I visited them more often. In my 20s, I lived across the street and visited every week.  Now, it’s a 45-minute drive from my Illinois home. 

In August, the barn sparrows are more active than usual. The grass spider webs spot the landscape and are only visible in dewy morning light. The heat is unbearable,  so it’s best to cut lawns on high to keep things green instead of brown. The Chinese lantern tree and poplar tree begin to lose their leaves. Monarchs and other butterflies pepper the sky, although there are fewer than in the past. We plan to leave the leaves so the fireflies can survive to blink and breed another summer.

Fires burn Maui, Oregon,  Washington,  and Canada.

The fog fills the humid mornings and tomatoes are ripening on vines. Every other year, the black walnut tree fruits and drops its nuts on the tin roof of our garage.  The dog jumps each time a walnut bangs our roof, while the squirrels and crows delight.

In September the walnuts continue to fall onto our garage roof. The jalapenos and tomatoes ripen on vines. Sweet autumn clematis blooms its white beard around other planters and poles. Goldenrod yellow signals the last of summer.  And the first false Fall cools the late summer air.

My brilliant goddaughter, Willa, briefly visits and makes us a meal she’s learned while traveling Slavic countries.  We eat borscht and laugh away our anxieties. 

Fires burn across southern Louisiana. This isn’t normal.  The world is burning on all ends.

Trustifarians at Burning Man are trapped by rain and river basin mud. White girls in dreadlocks don’t know whether to dance or cry. They’re getting trench foot because no amount of money is going to help when you’re too stupid to not dance in desert mud.

By September’s end, the hot summer turns cool, and autumn whispers in. Snakeroot blossoms in the woods and in my neglected yard. The Japanese maple has turned red. I tuck my Halloween horror gnome beneath the tiny maple’s leaves.  At night the gnome’s eyes glow like a night owl. 

As October nears, stink bugs crawl in and up the house. The grass spiders and orb spiders and multitudes of spiders spin webs everywhere. Morning fogs hang over the neighbor’s pond and in the trees. A wake of buzzards eat the doe who has died in a blind neighbor’s fenced backyard.

Tallie hangs our blow-up light-up eyes in the front bushes. My oldest niece’s mother, Angene, passes away. My friend Debbie dies of a heart attack while recovering from brain surgery. I feel the freeze, the thaw, the flush of emotions followed by an uncanny stoicism.

Israelis are exterminating Palestinians. The level of dehumanization which humans inflict on other humans is mind boggling.  Life is hard enough as it is, what with people dying from cancer and heart attacks and whatever else is not deliberate war on each other.  

I want to run away from here, but where would I go? Scotland is flooding. 

Tree leaves are turning yellow red orange. The dogwood is crimson. I almost hit a deer one morning on the way to work.  I have another bout of Covid. I now have bronchitis.  It’s time to put the gardens to bed. Skeletons and witches are everywhere. We’re in red alert. People shouldn’t indulge in bonfires,  because we’re one stray flame away from burning,  too.

The yard is covered in leaves, pine cones, and pine needles.  The poison ivy hiding beneath the pine trees is bursting blood red. It’s almost Halloween; it’s time to light the fireplace and turn the central heating on.

A Christian fundamentalist seditionist is now House Speaker. The community college where I work is making it clear books, creative writing,  literature,  and libraries are unimportant. Low priority. We’re slowly being consumed by right-wing nutjobs. Tallie is bullied by a co-worker and files a complaint about being purposefully misgendered.  HR then misgenders her in their write up of her complaint.  It feels unsafe everywhere.

November starts with a freeze. I feel as if a vampire has drained every drop of my patience.  The birds are moving. Mummerations start to dance in the sky. A Northern Flicker drinks from my bird bath. The sun goes down at 5 p.m. The horizon is orange as a rabbit darts out of the woods and under our deck. Down South the sun sets later.  I miss this about the Texas.  I miss Louisiana’s longer days,  too. 

My now deceased friend, Mark Spitzer,  once called me from Arkansas and complained about the sun setting at 7. When he called, the Midwest was dark by 5. Everything is relative to the sun. 

Mark retired early so he could move to New York to be with his wife. Stomach cancer thwarted his desire. The doctors initially treated him for GERD. No one knows anything for certain. The ice I felt when I first heard he passed away has melted many times over and I find myself crying in private moments.

We celebrate Thanksgiving at a friend’s home. Their Friendsgivings are becoming tradition and we are grateful for the community.  Willa returns to St. Louis to join us. She tells us she’s spending Christmas in Peru. I’m in awe of her. She’s building her life on her terms.

At home, a neighbor politely urges us to not leave the leaves.  We’re leaving the leaves. It’s not about appearances for us.

It took me this long to understand how appearances mean very little,  how words have betrayed me. I’ve given words too much of my trust. It’s not words I should listen to. I need to train my ears to listen to actions and what’s in someone’s heart. 

During end-of-semester student-teacher conferences,  I fan-girl over a student’s mom. My student has cited his mom as a source for a paper he’s writing, so I google her to see if she has the credentials. And boy howdy, does she! She’s an equity activist in North St. Louis County.  She does the work.  

We leave the leaves. The mummerations are in full fanciful force now. The daylight hours are short. I fight going to bed at 8 p.m. I fight waking up at 5 a.m.

December is when we start placing bets. Is it going to be a harsh winter? Is it going to be a warm winter? Will we get snow? Climate change has thrown a wrench in the weather prediction game.

The wild winds will return soon. This I know for sure. 

We gear up for gearing down. Natalie and I go to the St. Louis Art Museum to see “The Culture “ an art exhibit about hip hop and how it has influenced culture globally.  I am inspired. 

My brother-in-law has a stroke. My niece is spending this Merry season in the hospital at his side. She texts and calls looking for support and comfort.  I feel helpless and awkward and worry I will say the wrong thing. 

It’s unseasonably warm here. All the rain used to be snow. Climate change is accelerating,  so I splurged and bought a small generator. Like smudging my dear friend in sage, it makes me feel better to DO something. 

I hung Christmas lights on our porch on Thanksgiving. We hang lights on a baby Evergreen for Solstice. I feel compelled to hang lights everywhere. It’s not that I am a big fan of Christmas.  It’s that I hate the darkness.