I'm Learning to Play Nice with Joy
At 3:30am on February 19th, I woke up in a chilly room in northern Ohio thinking about my great-great-great grandparents, their aunts and uncles, their cousins and sisters and friends they might have called family. They braved unforgiving winters in rural Michigan, not far from where I lay next to a clanking radiator, a quarter of the way through a cross-country road trip. I didn’t know them. I don’t know if they were good, or what they contributed, or what/who they loved.
I do know that for some reason, I love the Midwest. Most people think I’m from there when they first meet me - and somehow, I’ve found so many friends from that area. I could never figure out why I connected with them so much, but we all seem to share some kind of weird, unspoken bond. Do we all just appreciate the beauty of a still corn field? Do each of us enjoy strong coffee? Have we all played softball for at least two years of our adolescent lives? Did they, like me, grow up on a farm? Are we just passionate about kindly holding doors for one another?? Maybe I’ll never know.
When I was on my fifth or sixth hour of driving earlier that day, I was listening to a podcast and was introduced to the poem, i’m going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense by Danez Smith. It was uncanny, as the author of the poem, just like me, was relocating to the west coast. In the poem, they express their discontent with the never-ending sunshine of California, and yearn for the more desolate, freezing landscape that they’re used to. When the podcast host read the line, “I know something that doesn’t die can’t be beautiful”, I laughed because I used to say stuff like that all the time. But something still felt so true about Danez’ words. Whenever I stand outside in the winter, just uncomfortable enough to lose track of myself, “the snow & stalled sea—a field of mirror” around me, it just feels like real life. I’ve never believed in a constant state of happiness, and I’ve always stood so firm in my belief sunshine and summertime felt fake because of that. Harshness has been consistently familiar.
While I continued my drive in below-freezing temps, I started to reflect a lot on the reasons as to why I’ve felt so strongly about preferring winter. Sure, I hate being sweaty, I loathe bug bites, and just cannot stand the feeling of air conditioning – but was it deeper than that? Maybe some part of me never liked warm weather because it made me jealous. Maybe it seemed unfair, that happiness could be so abundant.
Before this year, I could never see myself standing in the sunshine feeling like myself.
Last week, one of my friends was telling me about genealogy research she was doing on her family in Puerto Rico. She told me that until she was a teenager, she had this recurring nightmare that she showed up to school without shoes on. After interviewing her family, she found out that her paternal grandfather grew up so poor that he didn’t own a pair of shoes until he got his first job at the age of 12. Isn’t that wild? That maybe his deep seeded wanting traveled all the way through his bloodline to her adolescent brain and planted itself there?
Maybe I like the Midwest so much because my ancestors planted their own seeds there; they tilled the earth, grew a family, suffered for each other in the name of love or survival or something else I’ll never fully understand. Maybe they, and I, learned to befriend hardship because we had no other options. Maybe by the time I reach California, I can meet the endless green and warmth as a friend – and accept that a happy life is equally real to a painful one.