Midwest Winter

Each season comes and goes in its own significant way. Now, Fall rolls in with a cool breeze that turns leaves into gold and our breaths into clouds of steam before our eyes. The season has a viscerally nostalgic quality and I’m reminded of the poem “nothing gold can stay.” Perhaps that’s why every year, Fall feels like that last twinkle of magic before childhood fades away into memory. 

The air feels just like it did when I was little. The cold just tickles as opposed to the impending sting of winter winds. A Midwest winter reminds me of the movie I’m Thinking of Ending Things which I watched for the first time in a dorm room during my first month of college. It’s set in a freezing rural wasteland and moves through each scene like a seamless fever dream. Somewhere towards the end, the main character, a butt-naked old man, walks through a high school during a dress rehearsal for Oklahoma! as the actors as well as younger versions of him and his wife perform the dream ballet. In the end, it’s revealed that the movie had been the old man’s hallucination as he froze to death in his car after his shift as a night janitor at the school. 

I had never seen a movie like it and I think about it often because of how dark and surreal it felt. It was a metaphor for the winter of one’s life, when days are dark and snow blocks the sun, the cold freezes the ground, causing the plants to wither away. Confusion settles in and faces blend together, contemporaries and loved ones are lost or forgotten. 

My dad’s father had died of Alzheimer’s disease which must be the scariest way to die. His wife, my grandmother, died about three months before him and during that time he met his steep decline into death. It seemed almost like he reverted to a time when he was a child or a young man, and didn’t know where he was, couldn’t recognize his own children let alone his grandchildren, yet was brought back to a child-like version of himself whenever he heard a song from his youth. 

When winter arrives, I think of the power of memory and the fearful void that comes when it is lost, or the delicate mortality of the human brain, a lump of biomass which stores the whole of our lives. And without our control, the seasons roll into each other, the brilliance of fall fades into grey winter. Our bodies freeze into the earth and the vessels in which we existed become fertilizer for new life. And this will happen over and over again for the rest of eternity.