Open Letter to Myself Next February

March 18th, 2008

Dear Self, February 2009 –

How’s February treating you? Is that thing where you cannot put your finger on exactly anything that’s wrong, but nothing exactly feels right either, the days are too short to get anything really done and you’re having a hard time remembering exactly what the point is in all you’re supposed to be getting done? I come to you as somebody who has recently survived February begging you to just hang on a little. It’s over soon! And even though this year I wouldn’t have blamed the sort of apathy I was feeling on the weather, especially since February was surprisingly gentle and mild and full of nice days that surprised most native Portlanders, standing now on the verge of the spring equinox, the week when the switch got flipped and all of the trees decided together “Ok, riotous blooms now!” I am distracted by my own optimism, happy on the saturation of the light, the abundance of color, was made dizzyingly content driving the kids to school this morning by the reflection of light on wet pavement, on passing bus stop after bus stop where people had their noses pressed to books, wanted to press and keep the sense of well-being and life rushing back in full force. I am intoxicated on the smell of damp earth, on smelling again after weeks of allergy sniffles and sinus pressure and never really succumbing to a cold but never really feeling well. These allergies come with all of this itchiness until I feel like a reptile trying to shed old skin and it is so hard in the discomfort to keep any sort of perspective about how it isn’t going to last forever, to remember that a morning like this morning is coming.

One of my realizations this year has been that everyone around me is a grown-up if by grown-up you mean “able to sustain long conversations about recipes and gardening” like I remember my mother doing with the neighbor, and I feel like I’ve been focussing on other things for long that I still feel outside of those conversations as I did when I was eleven and could understand what they were saying but also couldn’t, but maybe I am slowly picking up by the most passive osmosis some of the interest in these things or at least understanding of why they are useful, and here is what I have learned I should do with my Oregon yard: cut everything way, way back. Not the tentative shrub pruning I did in Texas, shaping the green things in front of my living room windows so that I could continue seeing out the window, but really, when it’s done growing, chopping all sorts of things back to the ground or trunk or what have you. Not sure what the exceptions are in my yard, but the things I did take on faith and cut back on because they were looking bedraggled and pathetic have rewarded me by growing beautifully, budding happily and lots of live-looking parts. And I won’t overwhelm you with the technical vocabulary I don’t have but trust maybe you’ll have learned more names of plants in the yard and the appropriate timing and degree of trimming, because really what I am trying to do is once again bludgeon you with obvious metaphor.

So, dear February self, it’s a sunny day and you’re saying to yourself “So that’s not the problem…” or if it’s one of those days when you haven’t seen the sun in six weeks and are muttering “The sun’s not that great, it just makes you hot and sweaty and sticky and the bright light just makes headaches worse, we moved to Portland because we LIKE a rainy day” I beg you to glance once again at the pictures I took in the yard this morning, and trust me that there will be a morning within a month that is spectacularly delicious. And while you should trim back the dead and unuseful things in your life making room for new things to grow, please don’t trim back the writing too much because every now and again you surprise yourself and write the thing you most need to read.

All my love and affection,
your March 2008 self