Elizabeth Obermeyer

It’s dark in the mornings when I wake up now. I love it.

I finally feel like me again, moving quietly through the house, not turning on many lights, as if the day can’t start until the lights are on and I’m trying to delay the moments I have to flip on the kitchen lights. To make my lunch. To swallow the pills I need each day. I can make tea in the dark of the kitchen and I do, the only light coming from the streetlights and the short burst of bright light from the fridge when I pull out the milk.

“I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.” So said Georgia O’Keeffe, and I feel that deeply.

The dark seasons are my time. I see it in my desire to reconnect, to gather:  inviting some friends to Thanksgiving dinner, organizing an evening out with other friends, messaging the group chat about an event with a band we all like and reminding them that tickets will sell out so we should act quickly.

Fall means author events, too. Jane Urquhart at the Art Gallery of Hamilton last week while dusk fell and the lights of the city crept in through the windows. The annual Wild Writers Literary Festival in Waterloo at the beginning of November for which I’ve treated myself to  an entire weekend away and oh, the decadence and thrill of booking a hotel to be there for the duration, ensuring I won’t miss a thing. 

I read something recently about how as adults we have been conditioned to crave summer because in our past, summer meant two full months of freedom from the regimented school days, and how that is the high we have all been chasing, and that has stuck with me. Truly though, we are not a monolith, and like many things one reads on the web, it is not at all nuanced and we as humans contain nuances, but I get what the person means. Summer is when the majority of us take vacation, should we be lucky enough to have vacation. Summer is when things slow down at our jobs (likely due to all the vacation) and when the mornings come early and the evenings seem to last forever, summer can feel like freedom.

But summer can also be cruel.

To me, summer is a harsh season, mostly because I can’t seem to spend much time outside without injuring myself in some way. Heat, sun, humidity, these are my enemies. It wasn’t always like that. Age can do a number on one’s tolerance for a lot of things.

Autumn is softer, to me. Even on days when the temperatures reach 25 or 27, there is the ability to cool off. Shade works, shall we say, in autumn, where it really doesn’t in summer. At least in southern Ontario it doesn’t. And, of course, there is the promise of an end to the hot weather. Hot days in October are numbered. Very hot days in April just work to remind you of what is coming in the next four to five months. 

I am more than ready to embrace the coolness of the mornings. I’m ready to spend time reading on the porch on sunny, chilly afternoons. I’m ready to bundle up to bbq dinner and wear gloves to drink a glass of wine on the deck. I’m ready for it all, friends. Let’s do this.