When everything else has gone from my brain– the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family– when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.
— Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
That’s how she begins it, Annie does, her wonderful memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh. The more I explore her writing (and I can do this less and less as grad school asks more and more), the more I come to realize that her writing is philosophical, mostly. Her memoir does take place in Pittsburgh, and she did grow up there, but she could have grown up anywhere and written something equally beautiful.
But she did not grow up anywhere. She grew up in Pittsburgh, and perhaps that makes a huge difference. Who can say?
I like her opening, though, that I’ve quoted above. And I like the way it goes on, and describes a topography I know and love. Read the book. Do.
But I like her question, too, or her suggestion of a question. What will be left when our minds go? Will Pittsburgh’s pitched sides be also etched on my mind? Or will it be the smell of the water that came up in our backyard after rain? Or the line of blue on blue– the water of Little Peconic Bay meeting the sky? The sound of my grandfather sipping his morning coffee? The graceful alto of my grandmother’s voice?
I know that, already, there is something of climate that goes deeper than reason for me. I just finished teaching William about the tilt of the earth on her axis. I know we are a more southerly latitude than the Yankee regions where I grew up. I know it is yet September, and I can’t begin to expect anything like fall yet.
But Still.
I want September’s longer shadows to finally release the damp humidity of summer. I want, in the mornings, for cooler air to rise from the lawn. I want October to begin with frost. I want frost. Yes, I do. I want autumn to feel like Autumn, for crying out loud.
When I was a student, back in my Pittsburgh days, school started with crickets, but it got cold soon enough. It wasn’t at all long before we were wearing jackets to the bus stop, and not long after that we were wearing those jackets home at the end of the day. It got cold in September in Pittsburgh. It got brisk. The weather Behaved Itself.
Not so, here. No. It is hot. It is humid. It is September, but it feels like July, and it will continue in this obscene manner for Some Time To Come. Moreoever, it will likely Never Really get cold. It will likely Not Snow. It will likely be a Mild Winter, with occasional snow showers that can find no purchase on the ground. Spring will come in February. I know that there are some (maybe many) Yankees who moved down here for precisely this reason. I am not among them.
North Carolina’s climate, in fact, is my only sorrow about living in North Carolina. And that this is not Pittsburgh.
The last several days here were mostly grey days. Grey, damp days, heavy with water, humid and heavy. And then last night it rained. I don’t think it rained much. I was out in it, in fact, when some of that dampness condensed to real water. (Rain is a miraculous thing, really, when you think about it, except that we understand it too well.)
But the rain did Something Nice, even if it wasn’t enough for the flowers, or the lawn Bill is trying to grow. What it did was knock a good deal of that humidity right out of the air, so that today, even in the sun, a breeze felt almost cool. (And a breeze, when you think about it, is even more miraculous than rain, and I don’t think its scientific explanation is really all that reasonable.)
Yes, it felt almost autumnal outside today. Or at least, it felt outside today that our latitude here is beginning to get the idea of what the weather should be: cool, crisp, asking for a hot cup of tea.
Though grateful, I am not fooled. The humidity will be back, and the heat, in something Far Stronger than any “Indian Summer” I knew growing up. But it feels good, this: Septembers as I knew them when a child, not yet alive to how they should be, but just breathing the clarity of the air, the deep cool in the long shadows of the trees.
