well how I curse that western skyline

I left Louisville in the burning heat. The first week of July in Southern Indiana traditionally welcomes a sticky, heavy summer air. Your feet beg to be released from shoes and a halo of hair sticks determinately to the rim of your forehead. So I climbed on a plane.

After a couple of days in Philadelphia we flew to Niger, where I met a sort of hot I'd never known. It was sweltering, blistering and drier than I thought possible. My lips chapped, my skin roasted, and in the heat of the day I laid prostrate in my hut with my skirt hiked up, sweating buckets and trying not to die.

A headache in this sort of weather taught me a new lesson in...patience.

But after weeks in this environment, my body blessedly adjusted. (It's incredible what we can endure.) When rainy season ended, taking with it its nightly relief, we were tossed unprepared into a mini hot season. Somehow, the air became even drier, tossing sand, trash and very small rocks into the air to cruelly pelt the skin. To look at the calendar, though, it still made sense for it to be hot. Perhaps this was a new level, but the concept of late summer heat was neither new nor unatural.

Then came October, and the summer roared on.

After I moved to Kollo, the air morphed again into what we were calling "Cold Season." It sounded absurd, I'm sure, to those few precious people who I talked to during this time, that I was shivering in 80 degree weather, but we donned hoodies and leggings to battle the new "cold" air. Many even moved indoors for the chilly nights, and I was told often by my villagers that I should follow suit to guard against an oncoming cold.

Sure enough, I was soon coughing and sneezing with my annual sinus infection.
November was fall; breezes in the village tossed black plastic bags into the air like fallen leaves. I huddled down, guzzingling instant coffee and hot chocolate I'd received in a package, trying to stay warm as temperatures dipped into the 60s at night.

But before I knew it, the calendar declared it was December, then January, and it was still an autumn I would've once called summer. The stranger the weather, the farther Niger felt from home; cool air thrust into me a homesickness for which I hadn't yet discovered a cure. I returned to Hamdallaye for In-Service Training (IST) grateful not only for the break from Village Life, but also for the long-awaited companionship of my fellow Americans, certain they'd re-ground my mind, which was spinning as rapidly as the whirlling winds of Cold Season.

Then we received the evacutation notice.

When we landed in Morocco two days later, Peace Corps allowed us a small amount of money to buy warmer clothes, aware at very least that we were completely unprepared for any sort of actual cold. We shivered and complained, and the weather made the whole ordeal seem all the more surreal.
Of course as you've read, from there I travelled through Europe in the gripse of legitimate winter. We purchased gloves, hats, coats and turtlenecks from the African market, but we were still no where close to ready for such low temperatures.

Or for those sweeping grey skies.

For the months of January and February, I was in snowless winter, biting winds whipped cruelly around aged cathedrals and along frigid canals. Hostels were seriously cold, often lacking central heat, and my Africa-accustommed body continued to shiver late into every morning. The pace of the adventure kept me warm enough, however, and while I vivdly remember being cold, it never felt like a winter I had known.

We huddled around space heaters and tucked ourselves under thick blankets.
In Prague I saw snow for the first time but only to fly to Ireland the same day and be greeted by the traditional endless rain. But for all the times I called it winter, Ireland insisted it was spring. At the turn of March, the daffodils were already in full bloom, sweeping spectacularly across countrysides already a richer green than even the Midwest boasts. Spring blooms spilled from windowboxes, and I busied myself planting seeds and infant flowers on the Cape.

Even as I was leaving six weeks later, it was surely spring, temperatures dipping low in the night only to rise again in the longer sun. I spent my last day in the country tossing a frisbee at St. Stephen's Green with another travelling American, only to shiver my way home despite his leather jacket and a Stout Irish Beer Coat.

So I flew to Alabama. In the South, spring was a whole different beast. Azaela bushes screamed from the front of every home and Crepe Murtles bore blooms the like of which we can't imagine up north. But these are early bloomers, and even though the warmth invited sandalled feet, I couldn't be fooled into believing it was summer. Storms blew in, as you likely heard, and I hudled one afternoon alone in my brother's apartment bathroom praying passionately for a quick and quiet end to spring's tornado season.

When I arrived back along the Ohio, where I spent a slow three weeks, I finally began detecting summer around the corner. I could wear t-shirts again for the first time since Niger, and the air didn't bite so sharply in the evenings. In fact, just before I left again, I spotted my first lightning bug, a sure sign of early summer.

But mostly, it was still spring. And so I flew to California.

Now, they say it doesn't rain here, but they lie. In fact, yesterday I meandered home from Yosemite Village to my tent near Curry Village, past massive trees, dumping waterfalls and towering cliffs, traversing the quick, ice-cold, crystal-clear river, in a mean, pelting sleet. By the time I arrived home, the sun was back to shining. Yosemite survived a hellish winter; the high camps are likely to be closed until mid-July at best because of extraordinary snow. Now in June, the Valley is gushing with water from every angle, and conversations rarely forget to include flood predictions, but the dogwoods and the redbuds remind me everyday that I'm still in the heart of spring, for my fifth consecutive month.

"Adopt the pace of nature;" Emerson wrote, "her secret is patience," but maybe he never knew a year like the one I just lived. I wish more than anything to find this Truth in myself somewhere, but despite myself, I'm looking forward to heat more than ever. I miss the baking Nigerien sun, and the way your cheeks get tight as sweat dries. I want warm nights and long, hot hikes through the backcountry. I want to get to know the Yosemite summer.

We're lucky at home to enjoy all four seasons, and I've relied on them for a lifetime to tell me that time is passing. Perhaps this is why I forget sometimes that a year has passed since I tossed that pack on my back for the first time in my parent's driveway, bound unimaginably for Africa.

But it did, even if it didn't turn out as I could have expected.

It seems reasonable some days to say it was just a year, just one twenty-third of my tale, just one or two chapters, maybe. But it wasn't just a year. Still stuck in this endless spring, it occurs to me that even when the heat hits as it surely will, life won't come full circle as perhaps I've allowed myself to imagine.
Perhaps in reality I will never be the same.