weather or not

I talk about the weather a lot.

Inevitably, I sound like I'm making the most banal small talk ever. That's unavoidable. Sometimes I am making the most banal small talk ever. But not always.

I'm one of those people whose mood is severely impacted by the season and by weather. Spring and fall are lovely; summer is hot and bad and winter is cold and awful. A moderately warm, sunny day, can't be bad. A cold, wet, blustery day is all the more likely to be miserable.

You'd think that this is something I'd have given more consideration before moving to London.

Oddly enough, though, it's been a gorgeous fall here so far. Not too much heavy rain. A fair number of sunny days - the past few have been bright and clear, 65-70ºF and beautiful - and mostly a lot of gray, foggy ones that don't bring any consequential precipitation. Those are my favorite. London is lovely when it's sunny, but it doesn't feel right. The city doesn't look as it should unless it's hazy and overcast, in my mind.

I know these days can't last forever, and won't, and I am seriously dreading the winter. As far as I'm concerned, wintertime is miserable everywhere. As much as the summertime humidity of New Jersey makes me claustrophobic at times, it has its own comforts: the closeness envelops you, and the air contains this full, drowsy tranquility, inviting you to breathe at your leisure. And when you breathe, you don't just breathe oxygen and CO2 - you breathe fragrant plant scents, and other life smells.

Winter is the exact opposite. After the leaves fall, there's nothing left. The earth dies, and it drains all the color, light, and smells from the world - except for the smell of hearth fires and the smell of cold. It hurts to breathe. The sky, which never grows truly black on summer nights, resembles nothing so much as fresh pitch, sprinkled with faraway white specks of stars.

Everything expansive about the warm months - the people outside planting in spring and raking in fall, the children playing in sprinklers in summer, the dog-walkers - they retreat. No one spends a single second outside longer than necessary, and everyone keeps to themselves. Gaps grow larger the way water expands when frozen - with scientific precision - and we grasp at poor ways of closing them.

Oh god, and then comes the onslaught of holidays designed to shrink those gaps - Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, Valentine's Day - in my mind, they're the four horsemen of the apocalypse, as far as holidays are concerned - and they always manage to make things worse. Thanksgiving is nice, and I'm all about Christmas, but in recent years, the joy that an innocent child experiences at Christmas seems more and more impossible to recreate as we get older, and no matter how much of myself I give, I always end the day feeling hollow. And the latter two...not going there.

There's really no way to twist it. Winter is a dead, lonely time. I suppose it must be, in order for the promise of spring to bring so much joy. But that doesn't make it any easier to bear, and I'm more than a little concerned about how I will manage it here.