(Illustration by Xia Gordon)
This is the time of year when my thoughts always turn to Annie Dillard—the kind of bog-wet March days in the Midwest when you sense that turn in the air, a greenness coming up. I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek every few years and dip back in and out of it often. I’ve translated passages from it into Latin as a class exercise (Campanam fueram per vitam meam totam), and among my prized possessions is a first edition, signed by the author. It’s not necessarily a springtime book—it encompasses the wheel of the year or something like it—but spring is when I really feel it, mud on my boots, the desire for a wind-chapped face and the kind of walk you might want to call a tramp through some trees.
Winter is hard on me, for the same reasons it’s hard on a lot of people. I live in Chicago, famously a cold place with a long winter. I’m naturally kind of an indoor person, and initially there’s nothing wrong with spending all my days within the confines of my house, or running from one appointment to another as fast as I can with only my eyebrows exposed to the wind, but eventually the seasonal depression, the cabin fever, the lack of vitamin D all creep in. It isn’t really that I personally miss aimless walks outdoors, or dawdling, or feeling actually warmed by the sun; it’s more that I forget those are even options available to anyone.
March here is just as likely to dump six inches of snow as it is to be mysteriously, worryingly 80 degrees, but even in the lion portion of the month, you sense it more than you see it, a kind of tennis ball–green halo around the ends of branches, a suggestion of a world that looks different from the slush gray of February. Suddenly, I become aware of new possibilities—this is the month in which, inevitably, I freeze half to death because I’ve optimistically set out for the day in a light sweater and flimsy footwear. My notebooks fill up with diagrams of garden beds and observations from the window. Life returns.
