When we decided to move full time to Grand Rapids from Miami, people in both locations scratched their heads. “Aren’t you moving in the wrong direction?” My short answer: “I’d rather have snow than hurricanes.” True, but far too brief to convey the enormity of the move, the unexpected feelings it evoked.
The move was wise—for family reasons, for escape from ever longer, more active storm seasons, for jettisoning a beloved but elderly house soon needing the equivalent of major surgeries. It meant, though, leaving friends of many years, one of whom said seriously, “You know, you can’t make old friends.” I began learning about our new city, its Dutch Calvinist-infused culture, so different from Miami’s dynamic hispanidad. Waded into making new friends. And found that not only was I observing the details of our new place, but feeling them, in nerve endings, in the air on my face, in the scent of dirt and imminent rain and new growth pushing its way through the ground, seeing it in the angle of sunlight.
Both my husband and I were born and raised in Western New York, though by the time we met and married we’d each lived in subtropical Miami for years. Western New York. So much more Mid-Western than it was New York. We hailed from Rochester and Buffalo, Great Lakes cities that know the joy of lake shores, sharply demarcated seasons, tough winters. We grew up with those demarcations ingrained in us, sharing an internal rhythm-and-response noticed only when it changed abruptly—in my case, a move years before from Michigan to Miami to take up my profession, teaching in the fledgling state university.
And despite my joy in the job, the shock! South Florida in mid-July, sun, heat, humidity with a force I’d never before felt, even the breeze hot, heavy. No cooling—that I could notice—in the early morning or after sunset. The air so soft, so palpable that it embraced the skin. Unbidden, a line from my college class in Spanish lit would pop into my head as I walked out in the mornings: “En el aire suave….” Yes. Suave. Buffalo had nothing like it.
My yearly rhythms, my subliminal responses to changes of air and light, were absent—and somewhere I yearned for the usual seasonal signals. Endless July, time at a standstill. What month was it? The sky still bright, the air still hot, how could it be September, October? No, no, an endless summer day, said my body, my skin, my mind, said every internal sensor. Trees green, leafy, flowers always in bloom. Palm fronds, still a surprise to me, rattling in the hot winds. November? Impossible.
Whenever I traveled to the places I still thought of as home—Western New York or Michigan—I’d be jolted afresh on my return to the palms, to the perennial greens and pinks and reds and purples. I’d just visited the real plants and trees, while these subtropicals seemed like strange stage props or Monopoly money, colorful and flimsy. Florida, my new outer landscape, had not yet taken root within me.
But over ten years, twenty, thirty, an easing in, feeling more and more the subtlety of South Florida seasons. Frangipani and jacaranda blossom in the spring, when some trees, like pongams, drop leaves dramatically. Always with us: hibiscus, ixora, plumbago. Bougainvillea in deep purples and fuchsia, climbing over walls and up trellises, occasionally white-flowered, startling in its purity. Night-blooming jasmine, evergreen, its summer blooms fragrant at sunset.
I grew to love the gray-greens of the silver buttonwoods and the arching oaks hung with Spanish moss—the color of mist. Trees, fruiting: avocado, mango, the tall, tear-drop shapes of mature lychees. Oranges and lemons hanging from branches, aromatic, waxy. At Christmas and beyond, lush poinsettia red and green in pots and rooted in gardens. The red cups of bromeliads filled with rainwater. The tiny shift in the air in late October: Florida fall. And the butter-colored light, glowing and soft, slanting across the stiff grass.
Spring: spiky mango flowers, their smell sweet-sick, as though rot lurked somewhere, yellow-green-blush mangoes the juicy reward. Picking mangoes to keep away squirrels and the flocks of green conyers that flew twice daily over our neighborhood, squawking, roosting in treetops, pecking and nibbling and ruining the fruit. Handling the ten-foot pole with its pronged basket at one end, grabbing the stem of the fruit so that each mango nestled into its wire cage, pulling with care to separate it from the tree. Mine!
Royal poincianas lining our street, brittle-branched, the ground covered with dark brown slotted empty seed pods, tree litter snapping underfoot, all for the short-lived explosion of flame every June, orange-red blossoms among delicate leaves. Then the raggedy flowers underfoot too, soggy with rain. Summer had come.
I learned to feel the end of summer, the tentative fall, usually sometime near the end of October, relieved that I could enjoy the new season as hurricane threats began to wane. Balmy Halloweens and Thanksgivings, the harvest imagery of pumpkins and russet leaves, then cut-out snowflakes defying the Miami setting, appearing in stores and on grade school windows. “Mommy,” said my three-year-old as we visited a mall Santa clad in red and white fur and tall boots, “when is it going to snow?” Even Miami, despite the irrepressible budding and blooming of December, acceded to some other calendar, ignoring the joyous green everywhere. I never could bring myself to buy a pine or evergreen Christmas tree for our home; it seemed so wrong to get a costly, cut tree, trucked in from hundreds of miles away, a symbol of renewal and rebirth in the midwinter bleak dark of the north that had nothing whatever to do with ever-green South Florida. So wrong, so out of rhythm. “It’s not going to snow here, Mom?” No, lovey, no snow in Miami. Just in pictures.
No matter my gradual, under-the-skin acclimation, the scent of Christmas evergreen for sale in supermarket parking lots, and in our church, for Midnight Mass, could still trigger my early sensibilities. My daughter had never seen snow; I had, and plenty, and in the wee hours of Christmas morning, I’d always half-expected to walk out of the church into frigid air, with crisp snow squeaking underfoot, the freshness a shock after two hours of warm air heavy with incense. Even after years away, part of me still longed each December for that full-on reminder of the season. But like everyone else on Miami Christmas mornings, I loved going outdoors with excited children riding new bikes, skating, shouting in the mellow winter sun. And no needle drop from our plastic tree.
Now, the return. After nearly 40 years away, of only brief visits to northern landscapes and weathers, my husband and I find ourselves cast back to childhood and youth, the old rhythms returning unbidden in the chillier air of our new home. Unexpected joy in a nostalgia that at first we could describe only hesitantly to each other: “Fireflies! I was remembering when I was a kid…” on those long summer evenings, so unlike the sudden twilights, the abrupt blackness, of South Florida nights all year round. We joked about high summer: “They think it’s hot here.” Such gentle heat compared to the body slam of mid-summer Miami. Late summer, Queen Anne’s lace and chicory and ragweed blooming, just-perceptible changes in air and shortening daylight hours as we slid toward fall, and I’d be propelled back to my youthful eagerness for each new school year with its own rhythms matching the world outside. The first few nights of chill, maple leaves turning color here and there and then every tree—I have not relearned them yet—transformed, yellows, scarlets, rich dark reds and deep browns. Leaves underfoot. The starkness of November, the excitement of our first snow. “Snow!” said my husband, pulling on his new boots, thrilled to walk, to leave prints, to see flakes falling on his jacket. “Snow!” we beamed, as our golden retriever romped and jumped at this new strange stuff. The long long winter, so much snow, finally the gray and silver landscapes of February, March. Cold, cold spring, but crocuses nonetheless, daffodils, and flowering trees whose names we did not remember.
Remembering, returning. Home.
