Winter is here...

...and it's easier than I expected

Indiana University in the fall. Unfairly gorgeous.

I’ve come across a lot of opportunities lately I thought would bear incredible fruit.

You know when you see some amazing possibilities, how good it feels to line up all your ducks to get them? How that hope pulls you through your days, sure that if you check all the right boxes, of course everything’s gonna work out? All of my focus was going into nurturing these possibilities—which is why I haven’t been posting.

And then, one by one, they all just collapsed like a flan in a cupboard. (Anyone else joke to hide heartbreak? Just me? Didn’t think so.) Not a single thing has worked out the way I’d hoped. But that’s life.

The walking cure

Accepting these losses has been hard, and one of the ways I process my emotions is by going on walks. I’ve been surprised to discover that I actually enjoy them more, not less, when it’s cold. And as things were slowly coming together and then falling apart, I was enjoying my first Midwestern fall in 25 years.

And it. Was. Awesome.

THIS IS ABSURD. RAIN ON LEAVES? IN THIS ECONOMY?!

The day before yesterday, I was on one of these walks, planning to turn it into a run. It had been another particularly hard day; another of my efforts had failed, and I was fighting a general sense of futility.

I had my headphones in and was blasting my get-ready-to-sprint music when a family of deer to my left took off running. It was a large doe and two fawns—I’d spooked them a bit when I passed them earlier. I saw that the reason for their flight was a big black dog, whose apparently up-to-11 barking was drowned out by Teddy Pendergrass.

The doe, her fawns, and the dog all sprinted across a lawn. Then all four went sailing out of sight, over a tree-lined embankment, and onto a street where people are supposed to go 35 but stay close to 50.

I stopped walking, gritted my teeth, and closed my eyes. I didn’t even think to stop the music.

Seconds later, a man and a woman about my age came tumbling—literally tumbling, the man almost fell over—out of the house the animals had just passed. The young man gave me a strange, apologetic smile as he crouched in the mud. The dog circled back towards us, spit flying from his muzzle, and the couple tried to corral him. I stood there, also smiling dumbly, hoping that people were gathering because they wanted to capture a runaway dog.

But when a car with its hood caved in pulled around the corner, I understood what had happened. My music had saved me from a sound I didn’t need to hear, one so loud and so awful that it had brought people outside from indoors, pale-faced and stumbling, to help.

The next evening, I got home late. My regular parking spot next to the Stop sign was taken. I grumbled my way down the street and hustled through the cold to my door, cursing the students whose town I’d chosen to move to.

The next morning, I heard a crunch outside my window. Ten minutes later there was a cop car and a fire truck outside. When my neighbor texted me (Did you see the drama? Everyone is ok, but it involved my car) I poked my head out the door.

Someone had blown through the Stop sign. The resulting collision had spun one of the cars directly into the back of the one parked in “my” spot.

If I’d been there, my little red Prius would have had its California plate, which I can’t bring myself to replace, crumpled right into the trunk.

The music had saved me from a sound I didn’t need to hear, one so loud and so awful that it had brought people outside from indoors, pale-faced and stumbling, to help.

I don’t know what, cosmically speaking, is going on in my life right now. I don’t know why I can’t seem to line things up, or change the stuff that’s causing me pain. And like most human beings, I don’t like it when I can’t make sense of the narrative.

But I do know that in the last 48 hours I’ve been spared twice from even more heartbreak. Maybe this is just wishful thinking, a way of helping myself cope… but I wonder if not getting what I want right now is protecting me in ways I can’t see.

What I do have, which I definitely want, is the cold I’ve spent decades missing. I’ve decided my new favorite hobby is lying in bed, under an electric blanket, with the window slightly cracked. (I’m not gonna get a cold, my mother’s a doctor, she told me so. Don’t @ me.) My bed is right up against the window, and the cold blowing across my cheeks is a silly new pathway to joy. And as a friend recently reminded me, you can love more than one place, just like you can love more than one person. I don’t have to love either Indiana or California; I can love both at once.

And I do.

What I woke up to the morning after the hardest loss. It was exactly what I was hoping to see.