The changing of the seasons may well be the most hackneyed metaphor in the English language, and likely also in other languages that I do not know. Cliches, though, are cliches for a reason, and it was the changing of the seasons that I thought about when I woke up one morning a few weeks ago to the sound of rain. It was a rhythm so familiar for so long; a regular alarm clock during all the autumns and winters and springs that I lived in Seattle. It was also a rhythm so long missing from my days and my dreams. I moved back to California in July, and had not seen rain until that morning in the middle of October, save for one day visiting friends in the Midwest. I missed the wet, missed the sound of fat droplets hitting the window and splashing puddles on the muddy, blackened road. I missed the gray and the way that the water made everything around me smell like earth and iron. I missed the way that the birds sang right as the water dried up. I missed the rain, and there it was, greeting me, saying “Good morning, we missed you too.” I got out of bed and put on a sweatshirt, scurrying to the door of my parents house in which I now lived, stepping out onto the porch. I sat down under the little awning, watching the water fall from the clouds. I read a poem about rain on my cracked phone screen. Within a few minutes I had stepped out onto the sidewalk, and then out into the street. Pitch black puddles reverberated with the joyful displacement of my feet. A woman walked by and smiled at me. “This rain is great!” she said. “It’s awesome!” After fifteen minutes or so I walked back in the door. My father was on his way out, headed to jump start my grandparents’ car. I went with him, barefoot again -- a decision for which I was good-naturedly chided by my grandmother. When we returned to our own house, I sat down at the dining room table and looked out the window smiling, then sobering. As the water hit the glass I became fully, deeply aware of where I was; in California, in the fall. I had not been in California in the fall for years now. I had grown used to life elsewhere, in other places and spaces, with other people and other customs. It was strange. Perhaps stranger was the fact that it was October and I was not in school. I had not ever spent a single October that I could remember outside of the classroom. As I watched the water hit the glass that morning, I let it sink in -- I was here, in my parents house, in a California suburb, in the fall. I had been waiting all summer to leave this suburb, to move, to get a “real adult” job or a viable life plan. I had spent at least part of every summer living with my parents, but the last three years I had left come September. The last three years, I had not spent a fall in the same house as them. That rainy morning, though, I was there. I was not in school. I was working an hourly job scanning people’s membership cards at a gym and writing blog posts and social media content for a non-profit as a part of an unpaid internship. I was studying for the GRE, but didn’t know very specifically what it was that I wanted to do with my scores once I got them. It was a new season and I was in new territory -- trying to be an adult while living with my parents, trying to sort out how I wanted to spend my future, trying to fit a changed and changing me into the patterns and strictures of my old ways, old town, old roles as a daughter, granddaughter, and suburbian. The rain, the fall, the changing of the seasons all told me that I was here for the time being. Really here. It was no longer summer; that season filled with an air of transience, impermanence. Summer is temporary, a season of quickly-passing romantic flings and short-term jobs -- a vacation. But fall is not. Fall leads into winter, which leads into spring. It is connected -- here and real and unavoidable. In that moment, sitting there at the dining room table, I felt myself settle. Not quite settle in -- it was not a perfect fit. It was something like the way that a boulder might settle after being dropped into a narrow chasm. Having bounced and scraped, rolled and chipped its edges off on its way down, it comes to a stop at an odd angle when it reaches a portion so narrow that it cannot continue to plummet. I had been plummeting that summer, running every direction with my thoughts and my feelings, my relationships and my plans for the future. I had been falling, and now I had been caught. There in the rain that October day, I stopped plummeting. I reconciled myself, at least in large part, to my place in the world at that point -- in suburbia with my parents and an unknown future. My heart settled -- settled sideways. Very often, when I think of rain, I think of a washing away, a cleansing of sorts -- and it is. Rain does wash away stains and pains. In this place in my life, though, I am not seeking cleansing. I do not want to wash myself or make myself new. I want to take myself, as I exist, all of me, my past and my present, and be at peace with it. I want to feel secure in my sideways-settled self. And rain, I think, is good for this too. Rain might wash things away, but it also makes them grow and put down roots. Rain connects -- the ocean to the clouds, and the clouds to the stars, and to the trees, the grass, and the pavement. And all of this to me. And so I am connected. And so I am here. And so it is fall. And so I am myself.
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Rebecca Rose“There is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.” Archives
March 2017
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