Seasons, Spring and Otherwise

It is the first day of Spring.  Down here, it's a maddening time for me.  It's not quite hot enough to have the AC on all the time, but the house gets muggy without it.  I turn on the AC, and then I get chilled fairly quickly.

I'm taking a layer off and then ten minutes later, putting it back on.  I sleep under covers, then toss them off--unfortunately, this process wakes me up, so I'm not sleeping well.

Could it be menopause?  Sure--but I've been this way since childhood.

Last night I was having trouble sleeping for a variety of reasons.  A possible line for a poem floated through my head:  The menopausal woman considers her night sweats.  I was thinking about the significance of night sweats and the early days of AIDS, when sweat soaked sheets were a signifier of a different life passage.  I have a memory of the made-for-TV movie that starred Aidan Quinn, An Early Frost, and a scene where the mother of the young man tries to help him through a tough night that includes lots of sweating.

Now we talk about sweating, my friends and I, but it's in a very different context.

I am wary of writing about menopause, and for a feminist, I find that worth noting.  I remember as a much younger woman reading poems from women bidding their periods goodbye, and I recoiled.  I often joke that I'm a medievalist in terms of my body--I try to be modern and appreciative of my physical self, but it's very hard not to see myself as a soul trapped in the frailties of flesh.

My pumpkins that have been on the porch since October are finally submitting to their mortality.  Last night I tried to return to my Lenten discipline of mixing holidays and seasons in photography:

In so many ways, I see this image as a metaphor of where so many of us are, both seasonally (first day of spring, as yet another blizzard-making storm prepares to travel through the northeast) and in our lives (still young, yet seeing our mortality on the horizon).