My seasons are shifting
This has been the strangest summer of my life.
I’ve lost my sense of season and time. When I left Florida in late May, the heat and humidity had already blanketed us for weeks. I arrived in a Oaxacan town that looked like it hadn’t seen rain in years. It was swelteringly hot during the day (the fan became my best friend and my laptop overheated), but strangely—to me—cooled off at night.
My days had no rhythms yet, no routines. I spent most of my first three weeks in Mexico sick and struggling to find the energy to do more than one or two things a day. At the end of those weeks, the first thunderstorm finally arrived and I was nearly giddy with joy. As a Florida girl, the first summer storm is like the first snow. It made me want to run outside and dance in the rain!
In Oaxaca, the start of the rainy season has its own markers—a swarm of enormous flying queen ants leaving their burrows, that the locals rush to collect and sell as a delicacy. Tiny white rain lilies that spring out of the ground that was dusty and dry. The world comes to life. I, too, felt like I was emerging from the fog of fatigue and illness.
Then I was off to Puebla, the city nestled next to an active volcano. We gazed out our windows in the morning and took portraits of “Poco”—how did she look today? It was cool in Puebla, refreshing after Oaxaca’s scorching June, and delightfully sunny during the mornings when we sat outside with the students during brunch break. Over the month of teaching and learning, the weather settled into its afternoon thunderstorm pattern. As it slowly adapted, I felt myself adapting, too.
From Puebla I made a trip to Mexico City, to the top of a mountain where it’s always cold, and remembered I’d forgotten my socks and sweater. I spent two weeks of July layering on borrowed sweaters and burrowing in blankets, wrapped in the warmth of love from a family who treated me like their own. One day I walked through a cool forest, accompanied by a friend and a husky, surrounded by towering trees. It was quiet, and the forest floor absorbed our steps. I was filled with a sense of peace.
I returned to Oaxaca from Mexico City through the mountains and valleys, driving a truck I could hardly believe was my own. I arrived “home” to an apartment that felt like just another stop on the route—and a town now startlingly lush and green after 6 weeks of rain. I was only there for a week before setting off again, this time on an airplane to a new country altogether.
Now I’m here wrapping up my time of learning and growth in Colombia—where it’s winter, if you could call it that! “It’s the windy season,” the locals tell me. Indeed, the wind seems to delight in tangling my curls nearly as much as I relish its fresh scent.
The other day, a friend up north told me it was cool out, and I was shocked and confused for a moment. “It’s almost fall,” came the reply.
In Florida, September is still summer; it’s peak hurricane season. In Canada, it brings fall. In Mexico, September is the patriotic month, full of celebrations of independence. It’s also, as I’m learning, the month when earthquakes are most feared.
I’ll arrive back in Oaxaca exactly 3 months after I landed there “for good” in May. The end of a season.
This summer was unlike any summer I’ve ever known, and full to the brim with surprises. My seasons are changing. In fact, they have changed me.
Here’s to my first three months. My first season. A quarter of a year down. Lord willing, the first of many more seasons to come.