Freewrite 29 May 2026 10:06–10:37 My desk
What I really really really want is to be set free to summer….. summer… it’s sitting beautifully at maybe 70 and sunny perfectly clear, air is dry and buoyant… The trees outside are sashaying in the wind, their dark leaves glossy in the sunlight… it’s forever fun to describe the view out my window just as it’s forever fun to take pictures of my beautiful desk bathed in morning sunlight. These things change every day and I love drilling down, becoming aware of the subtle differences in feeling of each new day… so much can change. The humidity, of course the grand luxurious swing of the sun through the seasons, the angles of sunbeams changing every day, the interlocking cycles of day, season, year that you become aware of. The quality of sunlight, through fog, through sheer cirrus clouds, through humid summer haze, through a piercing blue winter sky, reflected up by snow, that one especially is crazy, when the sky is high and uniformly white and all below is white with snow, the light coming in is pure, soft, cool white, like we’re inside a photographer’s studio or a photocopier. The swing of the seasons is so fast though. I’m not a different person than I was when spring first broke, doesn’t it feel like I should be? There are four seasons here, so clearly delineated, of course at the margins there’s some wavering, fool’s spring, late snow, etc. But I mean you can’t deny there are four strong and distinct stable cores of seasons that are all eventually reached, more or less exactly when they should be. It is so fast, that’s not an illusion. Back home it’s not like that. It’s a smooth, gradual oscillation from cool and wet to warm and dry. Slowly, back and forth, and that marks one year. And the season doesn’t turn all of a sudden, now we’re in spring. It’s just the gentle changing of the average day…. there’s more daily fluctuation than there is noticeable week-to-week transition, much more. So that eventually, inevitably, summer has snuck in. We don’t all rush out to the beach the first warm day in May or whatever. And I do miss it, I really sometimes yearn to get off this lurid ferris wheel, everything’s too intense, and the way it makes us all behave… I understand it, I can lean into it, I loved the primal urge on the first warm sweaty evening to go have a frosty glass of something outside, but it feels foreign ultimately, I feel like my body wasn’t actually wired for this…. as I’ve been in New York longer and longer two opposite things become truer: I get used to it, I’m ready for each new season, I can handle it better and better, AND I realize how much it feels truly deeply foreign to me and my way of existing. Like I came from a different world. And I’m truly not saying this to luxuriate in a sort of exotic exchange-student otherness, it just really is that deep to me. Crazy… And I love figuring this out about us californians, with other californians and with weathered, seasoned, hardened East Coasters.
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