The Winter of Summer, The Summer of Winter

I openly admit the winter of 2010/11 was a rough one - I ended up in the ditch outside of work one morning, hitting a patch of ice and sliding into the embankment, but that's another story - but I'm strangely sad to see it go. 

No... I shouldn't say 'strange'... this is normal for me, this different kind of melancholy watching the snowy days recede.

Many people look forward to spring and summer. There is the burst of blooming colours -  barren trees beautifully sprinkled with white and pink blossoms - along with the eagerness and energy to meet the longer days, to walk over the green grass, to see the bare arms and legs of strollers pass, pale but tanning in the sunshine.

Spring and summer are certainly wondrous seasons. Life re-emerges, almost miraculous from the cocoon first laid by autumn leaves and the subsequent quiet walls of winter. People can't wait to get into their gardens - my mother included. People can't wait for the beach, kids can't wait for the summer holidays - so much 'can't wait, can't wait' as so many are looking forward to summer sports.  Hockey dads are active in winter, what would summer moms do without soccer? There is a certain raison d'etre, I'm sure, involved in little league games, in carting around swarms of tiny sports enthusiasts, their bodies buzzing with sugar and enthusiasm.

But for me, I have no kids, so there's no responsibility there. I don't have a garden - though I would like to someday (but that's a kind of lie I want to believe in). I'm also not a sports enthusiast. I could care less about beach volley ball. I like watching soccer on television with my father because he has an excellent memory for players, team stats that bring a new dimension to the game. 

Overall, I'm an introvert and though I work in an environment where I showcase extrovert tendencies  (I'm a tour guide at a winery, a rather entertaining one on a good day) I prefer Fall and Winter because the seasons suggest a time of solace for my inner sensibilities.

And that's just it Spring and Summer are about opening up, sharing, showing, revealing which extroverted people tend to do by being exuberant and social in large gatherings. These latter two seasons are by 'nature' (and no pun intended) gregarious. People sit on patios in the summer, the crowds come and go under sunny skies. Though people read at the beach, they are not slugging around battered copies of War and Peace. We have beach books because people want something mindless to read while they are mindlessly sunbathing. It's just the way it works.

Spring and Summer are times when everything comes to the surface after resting in the chthonic layers of Fall and Winter. As the grass becomes greener and the April rainfall falls away revealing bluer skies, I have to ask myself, like the German poet, Friedrich Hölderlin, in his famous poem, Abendfantasie (Evening Fantasy) Wohin denn ich? Where then do I go?

In the poem, the poet looks around him. The ploughman sits peacefully after a day of hard work. Sailors are welcomed into town by the church bells. Friends and family have places to go, people gather in the market, in their homes. Where is the poet meant to be, distant, alone, far from the crowd? 

I relate to Hölderlin because I have been asking myself that very question even before I read his poem in my early twenties. I have been asking that question every April.

In Fall and Winter, solitude is acceptable. We as human beings pull away from a world that is no longer warm or hospitable. The days are shorter and evening's darkness haunts our drives home, our dinner hours. Fall and Winter - the time when students are busy pouring over their books, when War and Peace must come out and be tackled for lack of anything better to read. It's hard to read something cheery and flighty when it isn't cheery outside.

Winter especially... that feeling of waking up, the chill, the longing to stay in bed but then, just through the windows, the scintillating but sullen blue of snowy mornings waiting to be breathed in. The scent of chilled cheeks, that blustery redness like a blush, so beautiful on the faces of pretty girls. Winter, with the hypnotic drone of windshield wipers and that sense we are living somewhere between a half-forgotten memory and a sleep-laden reality. Snow heavy on the lids of windows sills, snow on the roofs of churches. The world of Winter telling us to dream and wonder, even if the bare branches appear slightly nightmarish like bones torn from their flesh. 

Now here comes Spring and Summer and a part of me is asking myself, what now? How am I going to act and relate to people who, by reading the above paragraph would consider me a candidate for  anti-depressants. I don't care for the beach. I like patios but it's not going to be the death of me if I don't get to one right away. 

Wohin denn ich? I feel a little naked about this time, threatened (yes, 'threatened') by the warmer days because I know my solitude shows up, is readily seen. Though I like being social, I've never been that party guy, that social guy that knows everybody. And I've gotten to that point where I just don't care if I'll ever get a girlfriend... (yes, probably my problem right, this guy needs to lighten up...)

I suppose it really comes down to that feeling that Spring and Summer also represent things I would like but because of my predisposition, my biography, I'll never really have. There's a part of me that wishes I could lie on a beach and do nothing but read bestseller novels or spend an entire day drinking beer on a patio, listening to a band. But that's just it, I would feel I'm wasting time. And I'm not saying others are wasting time, it's just that's what they want and need. The way that the cool kids needed to hang around in circles on the play ground and do nothing but give you, you the outsider, the impression they had something going on. That longing to be the cool kid still resonates in me but it's so badly misplaced I have to shake my head. The cool kids are really the most boring people in my mind but what I'm not equally fascinates me for the fact I can't be it and if  I tried, I'd deny what makes me unique. 

And I've often wondered what I will be in the person, the being that will have someone. In my own fantasies of love and relationships, I don't see the person I am but this 'other' who goes to the beach, is social, has a large group of friends, etc... But he isn't real, there is no grounding to his life, the way a fantasy is merely a cultivated counterpoint to balance with our daily lives.

Spring and Summer represent 'the other' I'll never know, this counterpoint. The person I could be if I loved these two seasons wouldn't be the person writing this. You won't find me on a beach with a volley ball. I prefer a beach when the leaves are falling, when tanned steroid strutters are no where to be seen eye-balling a set of bimbos.

The poet in his Evening Fantasy looks further, up to the purple clouds where there is a Spring blooming - his Spring being a peace, a haven. He asks himself, why is the sting of restlessness always effecting him.

I know it affects me. I'd rather be doing something than not. Fall and Winter help motivate me, Spring and Summer are all about indulgence, superficiality, reminding me of People magazine and Cosmopolitan covers with bikini-clad celebrities - people offering us only the vacuity of entertainment. That is Spring and Summer for me. It's life in North American society which has yet to appreciate the deeper and finer things because it has yet to cultivate them. 

In the main and to best summarize: Summer for me is what Winter is like for the extroverted ones, 'the others'. I suppose I have to accept this. They got through the Winter, it's my turn to get through the Summer.

That Sense of Almost Home

The night's synthetic half-light, rolls over your steering wheel
I'm closing my eyes just for awhile...We're almost half-way


A house - the first thing I see, filled up with a family...
Surrounded by city and by sea...We're almost half-way
Will you wake me when we're almost half-way;
I don't want to take this trip alone...
- Villagers, Home

A co-worker friend is visiting Japan. Several weeks ago, before the earthquake, I was reading her status on Facebook, she said she was home but sick. I misinterpreted the word 'home', thinking she had already returned to Ontario, that she was back with her husband, happy again.

In writing back, she corrected me, mentioning she had a few more weeks in Japan. 

It made sense. I had forgotten how long she was going to be there. But it was all due to her use of the word 'home'. I then understood - for her, home wasn't here but there.

The idea then struck me, how home is sometimes, if not ever the place you live but the place you come from, the place you often want to go to. For my co-worker, home is the return. 

Then the earthquake struck. I thought of my friend and knew she was safe,  visiting family in the west. Meanwhile, homes throughout the north east of Japan were swallowed up in floods. A single tsunami had overtaken and destroyed the lives of many. I began to wonder what happens to our lives when our ideal of shelter is struck and weakened. Home becomes vulnerable; in the aftermath, the word then becomes less associated with a place, more a concept, a moment in time so strangely ephemeral, elusive, even irretrievable and yet, there it is, the centre, the very core of who we are and what we want. 

In the wake of the news footage, the word 'home' continued to haunt me. I thought of the word and how I've routinely used it in the past. While living in both Victoria and Vancouver, I would refer to home as that place where my mother lived on Vancouver Island. The various apartments I had rented and lived in, moving from to the next, distant from her and my step-father but familiar to me were simply way stations, unstable and transient places with a bed, a bath and some brief respite. Home was the hour I walked into her foyer, home was the good hug of welcome. 

While living in North Vancouver, I would occasionally take the ferry over to see her in Parksville and it was always difficult leaving. Not that I'm a mama's boy, but for me, it was like leaving the comfort, leaving the return to the past I wanted to keep. Every visit, the entire feeling of home rushed back into me. It was like time traveling. Though I was older, the childhood I had experienced and given up to be an adult came on with the feeling of home. Home in the coming back for lunch hours half-way through school. Home in a dinner meal, a time when my father asked the gas attendant to fill it up for twenty dollars. Home on a street that is still there but the aura of connection is no longer felt. Home with all her ghosts and evenings, watching the neighborhood kids ride home, lingering on a stoop, laughing at something a friend has said to embarrass himself.

Home and the "almost". In British Columbia I continually experienced the echo, that moment in the before and after of being home, a time of both anticipation and loss. There is nothing like the feeling of being close to where everything is complete. There is a wholeness in the dream of being home. Home, how it floats closer and closer then leaves. How sweet and brief. And when I left and returned to all my apartments, the walls that were supposedly mine felt dead; my bed, my kitchen, my bath and front door, as soon as I fell back into that place I couldn't really possess, that feeling of exile flourished in my heartbeat.

Perhaps it had to do with the reminder that I wasn't happy then. Home helped me forget, moreover it helped me forget the present and return to the past, appreciating its aura, longing for its rebirth. 

It doesn't cease to amaze me how memory and home come together. Another co-worker, also Japanese once told me about her first going home after so many years of living in Canada. While riding the train from Tokyo into the country, she said she felt quite moved, sentimental and tears began to pour from her eyes. In her childhood, she lived between the sea and the mountains. This was her home and when she left it for the city, she wanted to get away, to challenge herself and  live amidst the busy urban streets. Eventually she met the love of her life and moved to Canada. There were hard times, those barely getting-by kinds of months as she and her husband struggled to bring things together. Life eased up, they found a place together. But then after settling, she flew back to see her family and on that train ride, the sense of loss and homecoming collided in her. It was so beautiful, she said and I could relate. 

After living in British Columbia for over five years, my father and step-mother arranged a ticket for me to travel back to see them. I recall boarding the plane with a dance in my step. I was excited because I was about to see my hometown for the first time in over six  years. Arriving late at night, my step-mother and father greeting me at the airport, I wanted to believe I had just woken up and that those six years had been a strange miracle I experienced but had left no physical record on my body. I wanted to reclaim those years and start again.

But I had lived six years away from where I felt the closest to peace, a grounding. I left on bad terms with my father and brother; I left because I needed my space and home then didn't feel like the home I stepped back into.

On that trip, I saw my father's new house on Lake Erie, my brother's new condo and all the latest developments in the city. Soon after, I saw the house I grew up in and the nostalgia swept over me. I didn't cry, though there was a moment where I wanted to walk through that old front door again. I wanted to hear the sound of a barking beagle coming up from the basement. For a moment I even did a double take as my brother drove by the house, thinking we had missed our stop. Why aren't we pulling into the drive? I remember thinking. 

Since moving back I go by the house, asking if it is possible for anyone to logically explain, even metaphysically why a place could still be a place even though it had fallen out of our possession?


Home is the place of the beloved, the out-of-reach for me. Living in the sense of 'almost home' means one isn't quite there yet but what is there? Is it fulfillment or a feeling that you are closer to the truth of your life, to seeing it the way you have always seen it in your soul and not with your eyes?

Though I live in an apartment, this evening, after taking a long nap of recovery (I hadn't slept well the night before, having consumed too much wine at a family get-together) I woke up with that feeling of loss again, of not having what I had in my sleep. I dreamt my bedroom had filled with different colours - greens, yellows, reds and oranges. I dreamt I had moved on to somewhere else but didn't know. I awoke slightly confused and melancholic. I wish now there was an English word to describe that feeling when we have lost something that was never ours. A word to describe what we can't lose because it doesn't belong to us here, only in the 'there' of our souls.

That's the word I need.

The word would be in the periphery of the "almost home" concept and emotion I've been dwelling about. The word would make the entire yearning, the sehnsucht as the Germans call it (an often untranslatable word meaning the "inconsolable longing for one knows not what" to quote C.S. Lewis)  feel embodied, more real and less abstract.

But I'm struggling with this.

We have 'home' in English which is from the old Germanic 'khaim'. But what about the ghost of home and the emotions associated with that ghost. We need a word to describe how home is no longer home. We need a word to help us distinguish between the places we feel safe and loved and the places that have no meaning but we reside there nonetheless. For my Japanese friend, it is the former she wrote about. I know this.

Maybe there is homelessness in our language (the German philosopher Martin Heidegger often discussed a similar idea in his works).

Is it futile to think that once we create or find these words, it will be a matter of living something new again? Or is it just a matter of continuing, building new experiences in new places even though they aren't the same as the ones we want and can't have back? For me, home does feel elusive, out of reach and what pours out of me is the sentiment and the philosophy that maybe it's attainable in a different shape, with a different perspective and attitude. From now on, I have to give up the old home and bring on the new, moving past the mourning for the irretrievable.

Then perhaps, poignantly, the 'almost home' will lead my way to home.