novembers

This month is always a tricky one. Some of the best things in my life have happened in November, but also some of the worst. It always feels like an unruly month anyway, posed between the spookyness of Halloween and the festivity of Christmas.  With the end of daylight savings time,  the dark comes even earlier and stays so long.  I am never sure what to wear or which coat to bring. How warm or cold spaces will be. The other night I made sure to wear tights for the first time this year, but still found myself burrowing under my coat while we watched Frankenstein in the chilly theater. I can't just throw on my shoes and run downstairs or to the alley to throw out trash. Leaving the apartment requires preparation. Tights. Coats. Boots. Many layers. When I stay home,  hours after 4pm are dark and strange and I never quite know what to do with myself. It's too early to stop working but way too early to just go watch something. It feels like midnight but its only 8pm. 

Still good things can happen. In 2000, I managed to land the library job that changed the course of everything and brought me back to Chicago and settled into the place I worked for two decades after that. I came in for an interview on November 1st, was hired on Veteran's Day, and moved over Thanksgiving weekend to the city I had left after grad school a year and a half before.  In 2005, I received a call one morning from the press that wanted to publish my very first collection of poems and floated on a cloud all day on that momentum alone.  Other Novembers are hazier. Some delightful. Some darker. Like the one in 2019 where I moved out of the studio, sad that it was no longer financially doable due to rising rents and salary stagnation, which had been supplementing my shop income for the 12 years I had the space.

And of course, other losses. My mother died in 2017 the first week of November after many months of increasingly bad health that seemed to wax and wane and finally swallowed her whole. In 2022, I lost my dad after a shorter, but just as dire, set of health problems. The first two weeks of that November meant spending weekends bedside as the machines kept him breathing. Both had their funerals, my mother on a strangely snowy day, my dad, in mild weather and full sun as we interred both urns in the same grave plot. As I tried to mark the location by my sightlines to a nearby tree and the corner of the mausoleum, just in case I visited later. Three years later, I have not visited, nor do I really plan to. They are not there anymore than they are anywhere but memory. 

I would like to say Novembers can be beautiful, but I may be lying. The trees are usually mostly bare.  The grass brown. The holiday decorations always feel sudden and garish. We are closer to the beginning of the new year and less close to the January before, which means if you have goals and resolutions still unaccomplished, you are running out of time. Still, there is good food and maybe family gatherings and new traditions that take the place of the old. It seems like a long month, but look, its already half over in the blink of an eye. 

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