Out of America: Three Winters

Too much reminds me of something else lately. The slanted winter light; the musty smell emanating from the abandoned buildings I pass, or the old books I rummage through in stalls at the market; the parks all barren trees and lush carpets of dark green grass; rain spots on the living room window—dog hair on the floor. Everything is a short circuit—a crossed wire. One turn of a corner and I'm standing not in a park on the Rio Tejo but in another park, on another river—the Mondego, in Coimbra, or the Susquehanna in Harrisburg. It is still March, end of winter, and the long dark arms of trees frame a pale sky, the too green grass remains, as do the birds and those moments of the day where the breeze lies down and the sun is warm and it's easy to believe spring is near, and it's just as now as it is then.

I had been living in Harrisburg the first time I came to Europe, and ended up living in Coimbra for a short time sixteen years later, after that first March abroad—an end of winter adventure made when you could easily get round-trip tickets out of New York or Newark or Boston to Europe in the off-season. It is two years since I arrived, this time to live. I wish I could say I have learned something in these two years—these three winters—but I can't. There is nothing concrete to relay, nothing revelatory or noteworthy. Daily life goes on, and the games memory plays will always lead us back to the places we have been—back to the people we were, even as new memories made here bloom every day.

What I do know is that the rain still comes in winter, and I still enjoy coffee and a book and the morning light. What I can reveal is that the difference in time zones now is greater than it ever has been in a life calculated in time zones, and that I dream every night in at least two languages and can't remember what language I've just been speaking while awake. What I know is that my nephews are celebrating their birthdays on the icy plains and that means winter is beginning its final act. What I know is that the result of a decision is not always immediate—it must, sometimes, be dealt with in retrospect—relying on memory and reflection to find reason in the present.

I can see now, leaving the US—the sun rising only as we boarded the plane. I can see changing planes and immigration and all that happened that first day, and all that has happened since—and I can find sense nowhere within the details or the experiences. Not in my notebooks or in the pressing in of memory. “See enough and write it down, I tell myself,” Joan Didion wrote in On Keeping a Notebook, “and then someday when the world seems drained of wonder, someday when I am going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write—on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest…”

The world is not drained of wonder, if a little dull, the morning not bankrupt, though a bit tiresome—the sentiment, if one may use such a word in regards to Didion, I think I understand. I have been going through the notebooks, trying to make sense of the account—to see if it has, as of yet, accumulated interest—but I seem to be still too close, too near the time and the events and the questions and decisions, the blossomed or blossoming results for there to be any sense in any of it.

Everything reminds me of something else lately, and re-reading Lillian Hellman's collection Three has me meditating on memory. Its value. Its threat. Its reliability or faulty wiring. Everything right now is a potential short circuit, even as every day new neural pathways construct themselves, new patterns are established and unused synapses shut off from the grid—abandoned until time or circumstance or the smell of damp undergrowth or car exhaust as a bus goes by awakens it some March morning—the winter light slanting as it does, some other place, some other self looking out on what lies before me today, still looking for meaning because some things never change—some quests never end.