Waxing days

Today I know what I'd like to write for you, and I can't, because of the penury of time I've got now that I'm back at work, and though there was time enough whilst on holiday I was too busy being, shall we say, happy, to park myself anywhere to write that wasn't off on some mountain or train or beach or ruin, and one doesn't take a computer to such places, thank God.

So instead, I'll briefly lament the difficulties involved at this time of year with getting along. It was good to head to the Med for the solstice and the recovery from it, and the days are now already so much longer up here in Scandinavia Sud than they were when we left. It was good for us - for me and the F-word. No particular troubles in paradise but yesterday I was reminded what a shitty time of the year this is for couples, with our closest friends here informing us they'd broken up over the break, and other crack-ups being widely reported. This is really the attrition time - the cold, dark morbid time when the cycling of the seasons gets too obviously painful, and mortality too painfully evident; if 2008 can die, why not you? And if you're going to die someday, why are you with person A anyways? Is this the person you want to miss you after you're dead? Is this the person you want to hold you as you go? Is this the person you're willing to mourn for? And if the year can be born again, well, why can't you?

Maybe if the F-word and I moved to a place that was always summer, I would never lose him, I thought as the girl tearfully told me she's ended it, maybe if we lived in a place that was always summer, I could always be nice to him. Rather too pat as the formula for a neverending love, but even as I tried to get her to stop crying my mind ran through the possibilities, comparing a couple aging with these lousy, shitty seasons turning over and over, rubbing their faces in the passage of the years and the deterioration of their bodies and patience, versus the same couple cheerfully and obliviously aging under a semi-tropical sun.

I don't know, I don't know. I just know that even though it's being Canadian-esque here with the cold, after the two weeks in the mezzogiorno with its irises and flowers and third season of citrus fruits, I do understand that someday it'll be spring again, by hook or by crook.