8 December 2009

It’s evening at Homewood yet again, but evening has been sneaking up on me a lot more quickly these days. Thinking about endings and beginnings, I remember how when the semester started, I would leave class at 9pm and dusk would still be lingering on the horizon. Lately I’ve been hearing rumors that Pittsburgh is the nation’s second-cloudiest city, next to Seattle. I can’t find any written proof of that but I suspect it’s true enough for my purposes. It’s not even officially winter and I find myself turning on my headlights at 3pm. Friends of mine who have lived here for some time say the winters are miserable – cold, dark, and more sleet-and-slushy than snowy. I’m worried about the tires on my Jetta.

There was some snow today. Not enough to really stick, not enough for snowball fights, but still. Snow, I’ve decided, is magical whether or not it accumulates. Sure, there’s a certain enchantment in a glittering, white-blanketed lawn. But there’s also something in the actual falling of the snow, the way it muffles harsh city sounds, the way it makes you feel insulated.

It has stopped snowing now, and I’m looking up at dark, barren limbs against a steel grey sky. The sight always reminds me of Watership Down, of Pipkin describing rabbits in another warren as “like trees in November.” Of course, it’s December now, but I think the description holds. Sometimes I worry that I am becoming like a tree in November. I don’t think looking at the graves and not feeling much of anything helps. The level of emotion I could feel for these people, for the pain and grief their loss surely caused, is so great it’s numbing. It makes me think of the time I found the frozen swan and sobbed. Was that borne of naïveté or was I smarter then than I am now?

My friends the insects are long gone. I do not see the woodchuck tonight. Maybe he’s hibernating already. I don’t envy the insects, but I do envy the woodchuck if he’s hibernating. Imagine being able to check out for a few months. Just sleep. It sounds gorgeous, doesn’t it?

I’m not sure if I’ll come back to my spot in Homewood. Perhaps I will in the springtime. It’ll be a nice change of pace to see the world slowly coming to life around the graves, instead of dying and blending into their grayness. It feels like a fuller illustration of the truths I’ve found here, the unending cycles that define our lives.