Crabapples

It's all November-y out there, and it freaks me right out.

We've "fallen back," it's getting dark at 4:30, and there's a chill in the air that brings my shoulders up around my ears. ("Don't wear your ears as a necklace!" my beloved Iyengar teacher, Ken, used to say to the class. Miss you, Ken. Maybe Novembers are nicer in Kauai.)

And this is nothing. When I lived in Massachusetts, the darkness came even earlier, and it got way colder. A girl could get seriously depressed, and she did.

Sometimes, I'd come out of classes in November and hard bits of snow would find their way under my coat lapel, first stinging, then melting. Suddenly, in my mind I was bereft, friendless, unloved, knowing it wouldn't be warm again until May. It was a long way to my car in the dark.

When I first graduated from college, I worked as a temp at MIT. My boss was not a cheerful woman, but she had a good excuse; her 4-year-old son was dying of leukemia. She left early most days for his doctor appointments, and I intermittently watched the clock and read my grim English novels, in a windowless office that smelled, inexplicably, of menstrual blood. At 5:00, I'd walk to the subway with my scarf wrapped around the lower half of my head, eyes on the sidewalk, surrounded by other people who, apparently, worked for a living. I was 21, and I thought: If I have to do this for even one whole winter, I will kill myself.

Hey, I was 21. But even in balmy San Diego, November hits me hard. It doesn't help that the change nips at the heels of turning another year older, and rings in a season of forced consumption and gaiety that historically brings out my inner curmudgeon.

And isn't it crazy? Although I believe what I've written here to be true, the start of November, more than anything, triggers nostalgia, makes me yearn for a time when I reveled in my ennui, cozy in the poetry and romance of youth.