paw on your chest.
THEY SAY MARCH comes in like a lion, and this year they’re right. We had a whiteout last Wednesday (I skidded home in four-wheel drive on a tread of Hail Marys), then a Nor’easter that never materialized (some believe it’s still out there, biding its time), and finally temperatures so unseasonably, unreasonably cold that everyone in the Greater Boston area, fearing winter might be permanent, scurried around in a state of near panic, as if a lion had cleared the fence at Franklin Park Zoo and begun picking off pedestrians one by one.
But then things changed.
This morning, the sun remembered to bring actual warmth with it. There was an ocean smell on the wind. A couple of hawks, back from the Florida Keys, rolled around in the bright wind, scanning backyards for a Pekingese let out to pee. I heard a sound that was strange yet somehow familiar, like the looped melancholy tones of a long-forgotten arcade game. It was birdsong.
Most critically, it was a few degrees warmer. That doesn’t sound like much, but a few degrees can hinge a season just as surely as it can unhinge a mind.
Earlier this week, I ran a low-grade fever. The slight change to my microclimate altered the landscape around me with frightening, hallucinatory efficiency.
“[H]ow astonishing,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals.”
Woolf would know. She suffered her whole life from mysterious, unexplained fevers. She would lie in bed and listen to the sparrows speaking in Greek outside her window.
Her diary, which is full of gaps, tracks her periods of convalescence like a thermometer. In the most moving entries, she resurfaces from her sickbed, laments how much time she has lost, and resolves to pick up the thread of her novel-in-progress.
It’s probably a sacrilege, but I prefer Woolf’s twenty-six-year diary to her novels. She was a diligent chronicler of her own life, jotting down anything, everything. The only experience she would not describe in her diary, she told a friend, was her own death.
Naturally, the diary is full of weather.
Here she is in January: “All frost. Still frost. Burning white. Burning blue.” And in June: “Perfect summer weather. It’s like an invalid who can look up and take a cup of tea.” And in September: “Hot weather; a wind blowing. The substance gone out of everything.”
Even in her last entry, Woolf was careful to note the “curious sea side feeling in the air today.”
A few days later she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse.
It was March.
I FIND IT hard, impossible really, not to see the weather on my birthday as God weighing in on things. I turned thirty on Wednesday. It rained heavily.
The weather this week was more of the same. Despite several days that thought about being warm, the winter cold kept reasserting itself, returning in the night to paint the town with a layer of black ice that had radiologists working overtime. There were bitter winds, night terror commutes, and Thursday flurries that served no discernible purpose.
One doesn’t usually hear the word “evil” associated with the weather, but New Englanders have begun resorting to Manichaean language.
And who can blame us? Winter is like a maniacal mayor who keeps extending his term limits.
Perhaps the word “evil” is too strong for the weather, but how else can we describe the spiritual acid that is late winter rain?
I suppose we should look to the Japanese, whose poetry is the greatest repository of written weather in existence, a fact that has somehow escaped the notice of weathermen, who almost never incorporate haiku into the forecast.
The Japanese have a word for winter confinement (fuyugomori), moonlit night (tsukiyo), and shimmering summer air (kagerō).
They also have a word for late winter rain—shigure.
My favorite use of shigure comes from the little-known haiku poet Shida Yaba (1662-1740), who wrote:
In this floating world
a voice calls—
winter shower
Yaba composed these lines on his deathbed. It was customary for haiku poets to jot down—or at least dictate—a haiku in their final moments of life.
I enjoy writing to a deadline as much as anyone, but talk about pressure. Imagine trying to concentrate on leaving this earthly plane while a crowd of students, eager with brush and paper, leans in around you, listening intently to your labored breathing, hoping to net a flutter of brilliance on the wind of your final exhalation.
Truth be told, the lines above are actually Yaba’s second-to-last haiku. His last haiku was just plain bad, so his students—and now his readers—pretend it never happened.
We have to look out for each other.
THIS WEEK, WHILE the Greater Boston area nursed a municipal hangover, courtesy of St. Patrick’s Day, we survived a stretch of what I like to call parking lot weather—cold, blustery days when the endless motorcade of low-scudding clouds mirrors the geometric recession and metaphysical emptiness of a strip mall parking lot.
That is, until this morning, when the winter finally broke.
The sun rose like a soprano’s Hallelujah.
I got into my car and drove with the windows down for the first time in five months. For some unexplained reason, after a long period of cryogenic gloom, driving with the windows down is the only thing that can bring me back to life.
The sky was a pale blue, save for the band of ultramarine at the top of my new windshield. (The old one cracked last week like thawing pond ice.) Somehow there were a few autumn leaves left to run over. The speed limit seemed out-of-season.
I was listening to Bach’s Mass in B minor as remixed by the potholes of Route 3A. I usually don’t care for liturgical music—anything played on the church organ sounds to my ears like a priest’s ringtone—but somehow Bach’s holy strains shone through.
Bach hated when the weather turned nice. As a kapellmeister, he depended on funeral masses—one a day, on average—to supplement his salary. Mild weather meant fewer corpses, and fewer corpses meant
