Cloudy

Sep. 13, 2010

It is cloudy today. For some reason it is these days that make me the most homesick. Is it only because I associate grey skies and rain with Portland so much? Or is the inward reflection that darker weather brings? I’m listening to Arcade Fire. There is so little of the familiar here. I try not to compare things. Try to take things for what they are. Some days are better than other. Warm sunny afternoons become their own entities that stand a part, like warm memories of a summer vacation. But autumn is coming on and with it becomes the reality of the choice I have made. But then I have always been a little afraid of autumn. I have never know why. Something of the unknown, the new, and the death of the old, knowing you will have to face winter soon. Wondering if you will be able to stand the cold that is coming, and here, wondering if I even know what is coming.

That last sentence can mean so many things. One moment I’m thrilled to my finger tips at the newness of everything, then the next, I’m terrified and my head is swirling and I wonder how I ended up three thousand miles from everything, that I realize now being so far from, I love so much. I also wonder why I’m mostly compelled to write these things only when I’m feeling slightly melancholy.

I saw a cardinal last night. I have only ever seen pictures of cardinals in books, so this small thing while I was sitting on my deck in the last of the afternoon sun, seemed quite extraordinary. For some reason, I have come to take a kind of comfort in watching the birds, realizing that there are many I do not recognize and can only wonder what they are. Goldfinches in the garden, and a whole flock of some large brown variegated bird out my bedroom window that filled the tree and made such a noise that I thought it was the rain. There are many sparrows in Providence, far more than in Portland. I have come to watch them as some people might watch the sky for signs of a change at sea. As long as I see sparrows, they seem to me my sign that things will be alright, and that I am where I should be. Ah, if only I could find my chickadees! I love them more than any other bird. For I will always be thirteen standing in the snow with my hands full of seeds stretched out to meet the hungry winter chickadees. . . .