Please don't mock my poetry

I think winter has finally passed us.

This doesn't mean that we won't get another snow in the next few weeks. In fact, I'm pretty much expecting it. But I feel like we've passed some sort of threshold. The weather has been beautiful for the last few days. I am sitting in the Institute building with the window open, and I just walked over to the sandwich shop in short sleeves to pick up lunch. Some of the trees are showing signs that they're getting ready to burst into bloom, though I suspect we're still a few weeks away. And on Saturday I went on my very first official outdoors long run of the season. It came none to soon. I actually don't mind the treadmill when I first get on it in October or November - it's fun to run with music again (since I never run with music when I'm outdoors) and to be able to push my speed a bit. But after five or six months, I feel like I will give up running altogether if I have to spend one more week on the treadmill.

Someone once commented that I talk about the weather a lot on my blog, and I think it's true, but I also don't think I'm any more attuned to the weather than most other people. Maybe I just write about it more.

I even wrote a poem about the weather a few years ago. I'm not really much of a poet these days. My poetry phase was in high school when I was much more of an English-y person than I am now. I take some pride in the fact that, while the few stories I wrote in that phase of my life were kind of typical, angst-ridden teenage fiction minus the references to drugs or sex, my poetry was pretty decent. I even managed to win a couple poetry contests way back in high school, one in English and one in Spanish, and it earned me some cash, some Spanish novels that I never read, and a day trip to Sacramento. Every few years the poet in me comes out again and I churn out a poem or two, but I rarely have the patience anymore to seek out inspiration.

I also very rarely share my poems. So it's a little scary for me to post a poem on my blog, but I've been thinking about posting one, at the very least for my family to see, for about three years now and, well, three years is a really long time to contemplate something. And this one seemed appropriate to the blog post.

No title. I never thought of a good one. Enjoy. Or at least don't laugh :).

It seems like all we
do is complain about the
weather, bemoaning the July
stickiness
that hit early this year and
sighing that the fan just
blows around the
hot air,

until a string of summer
storms pulls us back into our
sweaters and camps our
sandal clad feet into socks and
tennis shoes and as we
shake out our umbrellas on
the muddy porch we
bond over longing reminiscences
of past summers when winter didn’t last
forever.

And if it’s not the lingering
cold or hot spells or the
inversion that has
depressed our spirits for
weeks now or the
unrelenting sun that soaks
into the asphalt so that even the
moon-cooled nights remain artificially
heated,

Then it’s the inconsistency
from day to day,
hour to hour, “If you
don’t like the weather,” we say, in
Houston, Chicago, Denver, Utah,
“wait five minutes,” and we wearily
shake our heads and stare
wistfully out the window
at the disappearing patch of
blue and for a
moment
allow our hidden desperation to bubble
up to the surface, and then

release

in a placid communal
sigh.