It’s December, and I need to deep-clean my car. With a sanitizing spray and a portable vacuum and everything. It’s gotten to the point where I should fish out the loose coins hidden in the corners of the seats and in the cup holders, recycle the old notes, broken CD cases, leftover food containers. I should recycle the cross-country directions scribbled on Post-its, toss the dried flowers on my dashboard that have crumpled and shed, and finally deal with the bag of clothes I meant to give away months ago. I’m not a particularly messy person. At the same time, I can’t help but admire the way my unwashed car preserves things for me, embalms them on the floor mats in winter sidewalk salt and spilled coffee and the dried messiness of loving people and letting them into my enclosed world. Driving a messy car saddles me with a lonesome alter ego that I simultaneously wish I could dispel and whose company I perversely crave: a counterproductive cowboy who stews in her memories—drives away with them to avoid clearing the space for new ones to take root.
It’s been so long without a car wash that Mom, halfway across the country, offers to Venmo me for the cost of one. It’s not about the money.
---
I’ve been walking a lot, instead of facing my car project. Usually, I head due west, down the hill toward the lake, snaking along the hardening shoreline in search of a definitive end point. Each time, I forget the circular nature of lakes, the impossibility of finding the end-of-autumn closure I want. I could just keep walking in circles forever. When I get tired, the decision to change direction and trudge home feels momentous. These early-winter walks have become rituals to solidify the new season into my brain, as I force myself to confront the reality of the coming dark, quiet, and often lonely months.
Last week, the ritual yielded an unexpected feeling of comfort. Walking home, I was struck by the absolute melodrama of this whole winter business. The moon dragging its frozen self up and down from the sky, again and again, exhausted. The wind biting at my skin, adamant in its attempt to remind me I am more fragile than I care to admit. Here it comes. Buckle up. The dead leaves scraped by, then scuttled back with an opposing gust of wind. They shrugged at me, in their way. Above me, I squinted and convinced myself that I could see the dark pits and ridges of silver sand on the moon’s skin way up there. Down here, it’s winter. No doubt about it. Time to stop complaining and start figuring out what it has to say.
---
Like many people in colder climates, I often find the onset of winter difficult. Lack of daylight and less time outdoors leave me fatigued and uninspired. Friends begin their own hibernation rituals, nesting into their respective homes and dimming their social battery, such that it feels perpetually hard to solidify social plans and find the vibrancy of community I seek year-round. Understandably, the introverted tendencies of many of my close friends become even more pronounced when it gets dark at four-thirty in the afternoon.
With these seasonal energy shifts, I find it hard to maintain my daily routines, let alone muster the discipline toward a continued creative practice. Rationally, I know there’s much for me to explore in the stark, brittleness of winter. My creative work could only grow from a more pointed curiosity and attention toward the environmental and social hibernating patterns I witness around me. Indeed, when I slow my roll long enough to really see, I’m rewarded.
On a recent visit with my family in Wisconsin, I marveled at the layered browns of the dead prairie landscapes encircling my hometown. I stared at burned, bald hills that spotted the otherwise flat horizon with a weathered persistence. While I’ve grown to love the dense mountains and woods of my now-home in the Northeast, my return sparked a dormant feeling of attachment to the particular steadiness of the midwestern landscape in early winter. Meandering on walks with Dad and Noa, I felt my gaze expand horizontally as we caught up, widening my vision of what this season should feel like. The gravel trail was wide. The bare trees let in light. My ribcage bellowed with newfound breathing room. Later, in Mom’s borrowed car, I drove through neighborhoods showcasing craftsman-style roofs and Frank Lloyd Wright-era homes with clean lines that mirrored their flat, boundless prairie environments. Cruising through a yellow, the arc of a traffic light over my car mimicked the slant of dead cattail grass along the road.
This place is familiar to me. The lazy, unexamined version of Wisconsin usually occupies a too-known place in my heart, in the way that hometowns can lodge in your body, unmoving. But on this trip, I could look beyond Dad’s outline as he walked calmly in front of me and Noa, and something cracked. Two adult children walking behind a grown-up, in the place that grew us both with this grown-up’s guidance. Familiar, yes, but decidedly uncharted territory. The stasis of familiar images can shift, if there is space for new meanings to emerge. Winter ice splits and forks and opens. There is room when I listen for it.
That week, Wisconsin offered me a much-needed boost of encouragement to embrace the empty space of the coldest season. Yes, I will have more unscheduled time on my calendar, more silence. And, if I let myself find it, maybe more space to transform familiarity into a more present state of experiencing. The cowboy in my mind wants to let all of last season’s debris build up, obscure the possibility of new joys and aches. My car reflects this, as does my foggy brain and my lethargic steps along the same lake path. But I’d like to change that, at least a little. I bit the bullet and drove through the car wash the other day. I cranked the volume up on a Patsy Cline album and tried to enjoy the feeling of my car in neutral for a moment.
Until next time,
Maia
I’m also reading about, listening to:
Zak Foster’s Burial Quilts & reimagining ways to prepare for death, the long winter
“On Making Art During Genocide” - Fariha Róisín’s recent reflections
Plenty of Patsy Cline, though this is nothing new.
