Seasonal Affectation Disorder (Or, In the Dead of Winter)

Life is exhausting. I feel like the fall leaves on the cottonwoods and aspens outside, brittle, crinkled and stiff, drained of vital juices and vivid chlorophyll. Tonight I am seeking all that was colorful in myself just a few weeks ago. What makes a jaundiced person look so ill? It's just another shade of you, the way you turn in the fall: your summer tan fading back to your winter pale. I'm not sick, not really. Just tired. I know I don't get enough sleep, but it's more than that. It's the season. As much as I love mild, sweet, regretful fall, I know what's waiting in the wings. I feel it lurking around the corner, catch the metallic tang in the air even as the sharp fall frost on the grass tries to pretend: "I'm organic and harmless." Winter is so dark, even the numerous days of stunning sunshine doubled by the crystals in snow. And it's not just the light that changes, it's the mood. Winter has an evil mystery, a subtle invocation of that ancient time when its long cold season meant death to all but the strongest. Even the holidays make me feel a little primal, by virtue of their causes: Christmas, celebration of a long-ago birth; Thanksgiving, a people's narrow escape from death by winter; Halloween, the fierce, churning enigma of death itself. They pare me down to the only things that separate me from being something purely spiritual, the blood and bones and skin.

There was a lot of death around me this last spring and summer, and somehow it managed to seem natural and good with the green leaves and musky damp earth and warm afternoons full of life. I can't imagine it though, in the antiseptic winter, a death and then a grave in the hard, frozen ground. Some claustrophobic part of me rebels at the thought of that. Seasons shift and something else is stirring, something pagan and uncivilized. Maybe it's my special holiday coming, my marvelous, fanciful Halloween. Or maybe it's those tales from childhood, dark stories of the North, full of devious snow sprites and winter wolf hunts, full of dusky, shadowy medieval dens and ebony steeds and murky secrets. Christmas is dark too, all deep greens and blood-colored velvets and a dark pine from deep, brooding woods. We decorate with open flame and bright, barbed things of metal and glass; there is a certain Gothic influence to Christmas. And all season we are reminded of the even darker implications surrounding the life celebrated at Christmas, certain to make a good Christian shiver in healthy, humble terror. The moral of every holiday carol, each parable and tale? Look to your own deeds. Choose: redemption or purgatory.

I enjoy winter. I sled and skate and ski. I love textured layers of wool and silk and warm, rich drinks, smoky fireplaces and a calendar saturated with family gatherings. And yet, there's something wrong. In some deep part of my brain is a primitive little shadow, a teensy corner of fear that maintains a thrilling vigil. It waits for the threat in winter. It watches for deadly icy roads, the slim but possible chance of getting stuck out in the cold. Hypothermia, frostbite, lungs burned by sub-zero air- it warns of these. It warns of not having enough food stored even though it knows the grocery store is just around the corner. And as levels of summer vitamins run low, I all but lose hope that spring will ever come again. It becomes a fever. And then, just as quickly, I'm fine.

Infusions of artificial light help a little, but I'm more afraid of cancer than freezing to death, so I don't make many trips to the tanning bed. I'm not into Prozac or Paxil or Zoloft, so really all I can do is wait. Sure enough the seasons change again and I appreciate each all the more for its contrast to the one before it. And even as I suffer, I enjoy the vibrancy of my dark, fantastic winter fears. Just the same, winter sure can be difficult- that is, I can make winter difficult for you. So if I'm gloomy and snippety between the time the snow flies and the first buds, please ignore. Unless you can recreate summer in my living room on the weekends; that would be nice.