Florida is, if you ask most longtime residents, cold for one week a year. It might be hot and humid and come Saturday, but today, Tuesday, we are bundled up in parkas certified for negative temperatures.
This first week of December in the year two-thousand and twenty has been that week. I opted not to take a morning jog-walk Monday morning because it was chillier and windier than expected, and I’d rather put on sweatpants. It was barely hovering over 40 degrees when I walked to my car early Tuesday, and my tire pressure warning light was on. On Wednesday, 7am, it was only a few degrees above freezing and my car was covered in a crystalline layer of frost. I, in a pair of boots that belonged to my mother in the nineties, sat in my car for five minutes, heat cranked and defrost on, before leaving for work.
I dug out a coat from the box full of winter clothes under my bed, finding ticket stubs from past sightseeing tours jammed into the pockets. I waited in my car, rather than stand on the curb, for my lunch because the kind man at the Chinese place saw me shivering and offered to call me when it was ready (I couldn’t wait inside the restaurant, of course, because of the pandemic).
Florida cold is a different kind of cold than other places. Here, it’s so humid and, most days, muggy, that the cold feels wet. Layers can only insulate you so much – the weather, barely cold by most standards, seeps through your shoes and socks and coat and shirt and you are somehow cold all day, no matter how many layers you wear or warm drinks you drink.
I don’t mind. I prefer cool weather to the sweltering heat of the other 98% of the year, and the crisp air feels like Christmas, somehow, and reminds me of wandering through wooden-booth markets smelling of cookies, pine, and mulled wine from family vacations and high school dorm field trips. It makes the inside of my tiny apartment, where I’ve spent most of the year, seem a cozy alternative. I have an excuse to comfortably wear a piece from my sizable collection of sweatshirts, all of which have specific sentimental memories attached to them.
This weather, at its core, a signal of change. The cold days in Florida mean that the year is winding down. I meticulously clean the apartment, an end-of-the-semester deep reset. I have only a handful of finals left to take, I get introspective and reflective. I’ll leave soon to spend the holidays with my family, and when I come back, it will be a new calendar year.
I don’t really know how to think about that this year. 2020 has become a meme of itself multiple times over, mostly for being terrible. We all know the laundry list of chaos the year unleashed on us. Since March, and increasingly with every new headline, we have wanted it to end. And now it is. The promise of the new year, and the prospect of it being not-awful, is refreshing. But, I check myself, the problems don’t all go away when the clock strikes midnight like a perverse Cinderella.
2021 is also the year that I will graduate college. The paperwork is done and it’s a matter of time until May. It feels precarious, as such definitive ends to big chapters of life always do. I have loved my time here – though, that’s an essay for another day. Here, now, it dawns on me that the “class of 2021” that so often accompanies my name in these academic settings is mere months away. I will enter the “real world” and look for an adult job, one that will pay bills and maybe even have benefits, during the twilight of a devastating pandemic. That is both terrifying and thrilling, fear of failure wrapped in the possibility that I could do anything.
I wonder what I will do, and I wonder how this year will be remembered. Not by history, but by me. Will I remember it by the jobs I held, because they stretched me beyond my comfort zone and set me up for future success? Will I remember it for the one-off opportunities – the trips, the coveted interviews? Will I remember it for the explosive politics and social movements? For the classes I took in school? For the ways we adapted to the pandemic, Zoom movie nights and drive-thru dinners? For the random, happy memories that are hard to pinpoint – the feeling of being in a particular place, with a particular person, at a particular time? For being the year I figured out how to make the perfect egg over easy? The ways I learned to rest better and think better and the clear markers of growing up that feel so evident?
Or will it always just feel a little fuzzy, out of time, like it already does? My memories from the past twelve months are hazy, more like dreams right after you wake up, in that split second when you forget if it was real or not. A little bit like deja-vu. The pre-pandemic world feels nebulous and surreal now, as does the idea that we could return to that.
Maybe things will settle into the recesses of my mind in the future, when the days of mask-wearing and anxious contract-tracing are long behind us, when live entertainment has come roaring back in full force and we gleefully hug at large parties. Even if my memories never quite feel real, I think the haze of constant chaos will settle and we will collectively relax. But I think it will be awhile. And I’m okay with that. Tonight, I will bake another batch of funfetti cookies, heat up another pot of cider or hot chocolate or eggnog, do a little bit of studying, watch a movie or maybe call a friend.
It is currently 63 degrees outside, according to the weather app on my iPhone. I’m in a cozy oversized sweatshirt I’ve had since early high school, and a cup of cider sits next to my computer. On the other side of my computer is a pile of notes and notebooks, a marked-up resume I need to edit, and an odd cheese stick wrapper that never made its way to the trash. There are about a million tabs open on my computer to study guides and recorded Zoom lectures, and I am choosing to write instead. I can study tomorrow. On this chilly winter evening, I am choosing to drink something sugary and think and write.
My faith is so interwoven with my experience of the world; it is hard to separate the way I am processing this year without at least skimming the surface of theology. 2020 has felt like a year of lament for so many things in so many ways. That has been my default for much of this year, teetering between that resigned, if hopeful, kind of sadness and a cynical nihilism. There is so much I don’t understand and so much that is hard. Why? Does it matter? How long? How long?
So the weather is cold, and it is Advent, which means it’s almost Christmas, 2020. We made it. Almost.
O Holy Night is my favorite Christmas carol. I’m a sucker for its haunting melody and the way a good version soars (Sandi Patty’s is the definitive). But its lyrics are what has made it stick in my head, year after year. This time, nothing rings so true as, “a thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices.”
The weary world rejoices.
The weary world rejoices.
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.
Man if I’m not weary and somehow a little bit hopeful for a new and glorious morn.
The temperature right now, according to Siri, is 57 degrees.
It’s supposed to be in the 70s tomorrow, then up to the 80s over the weekend, and early next week, it will fall back to the forties and fifties, the frost and warm drink and low tire pressure zone. Such is Florida winter, and such is this year. Up, then really down, then up a little, and back down, a little bit miserable either way. It never really quite makes sense, random rain and then unbearable heat and then a chilly day with some wind. And then there’s hurricane season.
But we laugh, because it’s Florida, and then we go back to reading about Florida Man rescuing puppies from the literal mouths of gators.
And anyway, I like the cold, and sweatshirts, and an excuse to drink copious amounts of hot chocolate. I’ll punt the rest of it to next year.
So, Um...Yeah 