Change We Can Agree On

As I have said before, we do have seasons here in North Florida. Of course, they cannot compare in contrast to a place like Vermont or Minnesota, they are far more subtle, but we have them.

Yesterday was so hot and so humid I felt as if I might grow gills, or at least I would have wished to grow some as breathing underwater is not what humans do best and with the humidity up around the nineties, it feels like being underwater. Gravity pulls so much harder during my walks when the weather is like that. Each foot weighs a hundred pounds and the rest of me is like a sandbag I'm trying to drag around. One of the ways I deal with such heat and humidity is by just throwing myself into it. I walk, I pick up garbage, I go out into the garden and pull weeds which is back-breaking, sweaty, nasty work.

Add up the heat and the ants, the dirt, the work, and the mosquitoes (which after the storm are bigger and blacker and more persistent than I have ever seen), and yard work becomes a sort of hell but perhaps one I need. I feel cleansed afterwards, when I've washed the dirt and sweat from my body and drink a glass of water. Perhaps it goes beyond cleansing and into the realm of purifying, that sort of work in that sort of heat.

But really, how much purifying does one person need? My sins are not that great.

And then today, I woke up to find a slightly different world. It's far less humid and even though it's one-thirty in the afternoon, it's not even ninety degrees.

In other words, it feels like a hint of fall is in the air.

It's funny how the seasons' changes can bring memories to the fore, like Proust's bite of madeleine. Fall is the season my husband and I have often traveled to Cozumel, Mexico, and I believe I've talked about how this time of year I'll suddenly have a clear vision of being there. The way the sidewalk feels under my feet, the way the water looks and how I struggle to come up with the words to describe its blues, it's greens, its lavenders and teals. How the air feels, soft and warm, and how it smells of garlic and grilling meat at night. How the mopeds sound as they zip down the palm-lined streets, how lovers sit on the bench at the sea wall and talk quietly for hours, their arms around each other.

It amazes me how quickly and easily I am transported there simply by this most subtle change of air with a promise of fall on its breezy breath.

And here we are, in the first days of September, tropical storms lined up in the Atlantic in alphabetical order and yet, the air has a new quality today, the slightest shift in its temperature, a difference in the way it holds water.

We have plenty of holy-hot days ahead of us, but we have been given the sign that relief is on its way. It will come.

And our minds can go to wherever it is that this shift takes us, to Cozumel or out west where the trees reach so far into the sky that only the gods could imagine their tops, or to a wedding day in late October, 24 years ago, or to a birth in late September where the sky was so blue and clear and it was so cool that I could labor with all the windows open and there is relief in all of that, too.

Humans need change. All sorts.
And we are given them, bidden and unbidden.

Here in North Florida where we have sweated and dragged our sandbag-heavy bodies around for months, this change, no matter how temporary, no matter how understated, is something we can feel and most of us rejoice in it.

We can feel our bodies lighten and with them, our spirits.