Seasons Come, Seasons Go

The first time I heard Ella Fitzgerald singing Porgy and Bess, "Summertime, and the living is easy," I finally found a way to describe my cycles as a child.

I would always start to fall around Thanksgiving, which I adored because it was such a comforting slow down, on through Christmas and New Years, and finally reaching the lowest around Valentine’s Day. I was sick and home from school on Valentine’s day on more than one occasion.

When I was thirteen, I "ran away" the day before Valentine’s day. Understand, we lived about fifteen miles from the nearest gas station. I thought, incredibly, that I could just hide in the woods, by myself, indefinitely, living off the land. It was cold and rainy that night when I hid in some woodland on the border of a field. I heard my mother crying out for me. I will never forget that cold. I thought I would never, ever be warm again. I finally walked home in a daze, thinking that I could sneak back into my bed while everyone slept. My mother turned around when she heard the door open, and I saw the two policemen standing by my father’s huge desk. He was away that night, working on an oil rig. It would take hours for him to come home. Once again I missed Valentine’s Day.

My parents took me to the doctor that morning, who asked me question after question. I knew him well. He farmed on the side and I had been to his house, had a crush on his son. I wasn’t really sure what to tell him because I really couldn’t understand what I was doing. He told my parents to give me a few days off from school and to bring me back in a couple of weeks. I stayed home, but I never made it back for the follow-up appointment.

On one of those days my father took me to the beach. It was overcast and windy, sand blowing against our legs, the air wet with spray. The sand was wet, hard, and we walk along, side by side, and I waited for him to say something, ask me why. He never did. We just walked in silence. I think that was when he knew. I think he understood what happened more than I ever suspected. I didn’t realize at that time how much alike we are. It was about that time that I stopped talking to him, really talking to him. I don’t know why and I now regret it.

Then after Valentine’s Day I would start the climb up. Easter was hopeful, and by June I was feeling good. I just kept going, going to camp, starting elaborate summer projects, exploring the world around me, writing little stories and hanging out in the camp house where one of the farm hands lived. My brother and I would listen to his records, check out his stuff. He was eternally patient with us, and much later, after I had my son, he called out of the blue and told me that he had heard I had seen some hard times and that he was there for me. About two months later he died, apparently from the years of alcohol abuse.

Summertime meant picking blueberries and blackberries, testing the wild grapes until we found the good ones, playing with the white clay we dug out of the road beds, hunting for arrowheads, fishing for bream at dusk with cane poles, worms, and red and white bobbers. It was a time of staying up late to play catch and hide and seek in the cool white moonlight. It was a time of sleeping in tangled sheets while the room filled with sunlight.

By the time August came, I was filled with an incredible energy, a determination to attack the world with my greatness. I started school with a fire burning inside, the need to conquer those books, slay those tests, be the best, better than everyone else. I would go to the old arbor to do my math homework until the light winter rains turned the ground soggy.

My grades would start with a bang, and then, without my desire, the fire would slowly begin to die, until Thanksgiving, when I would feel the delicious slowness begin. By the time I started high school the depressions were starting earlier and earlier. I would become anxious as early as September. When I was sixteen it happened. The depression escaped, out of my hands, and I spent Thanksgiving as a new admit in the hospital.

My moods no longer follow the seasons. How inconvenient. It seems odd right now to feel depressed in the summer. The grass is lush and springy, the crepe myrtles are full of bloom, and the tomatoes are the best. And yet it all seems flat. It seems as if my clock is off, or nature is off. It scares me. What is in store this fall? Maybe I will get to see the season with the eyes that used to see the summer. Will this be the Valentine’s day when I am normal? It makes me wonder.

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