Birthday week

It’s getting cold here, which makes sense, because it’s practically June. And so I’m planning to have my very first birthday in the winter. This is an odd thing—birthdays do many things and we change the way we make sense of them and the way we feel about them, but we quite rarely find that they move from season to season. I have a summer birthday. In Georgia, we’d have big parties which would celebrate the end of the school year and we’d make iced tea and freeze juice ice cubes to float in fruity punch. By the first of June, it’d be too hot to cook much on the day, so we’d have cold salads and people would come in sundresses and we’d sprawl out and talk and laugh late into the still-light evening. In Cambridge, it wasn’t hot hot yet, but it would often be lovely and all our windows would be open and the world still basking in the deep green that marks the end of spring. We’d have friends over to our too-small condo and the place would be packed with people, chattering in several different languages, with too many children making too big a mess in Naomi and Aidan’s too-little room. In DC, we turned to birthday brunches, and we’d have friends and family and neighbours drop in and out and eat French toast and drink mimosas while children played upstairs and made messes we wouldn’t discover until the last guest had left, hours later.

Here, my winter birthday will be celebrated without extended family, and without an overflowing house of friends. We, strangers in this strange land, don’t yet have enough friends to overflow even this little cottage. But P and J will come over, and maybe F, and we will have a wintry dinner of stew and root vegetables and squashes (which here are all called “pumpkin”). And Rob and Michael will cook together, and the kids will alternately help and get in the way. And, as P and J and F always always make me laugh (as do Rob and Michael), the house with the new woodstove will be filled with laughter and a crackling fire. Is it lonely, this contrast between birthday brunches with friends and family spilling out of the house and this one where we’re hoping friends show up at all? Yes. It’s lonely. AND it’s mysterious and Other, a world where I wear sweaters and eat stew on June 1^st. AND it’s a dream come true, to walk on my beach on my birthday, to spend my day in the most beautiful place I’ve ever been—which also happens to be my home. Next June, perhaps, in the house on the hill, we’ll have more people to mark my winter birthday. This June, though, it’ll be a small band—our oldest friend and our newest ones. And we’ll look forward and backward—into a past that seems a million miles away and a future that seems impossible to discern. I suppose some years, birthdays are topsy-turvy, and this is one of those years. What else would you expect, anyway, when your summer birthday shows up with the first winter winds?