the trees in December

December has begun, and so has the season of cold weather running. I like running in the cold (which for me is in the 30s or 40s) but not in the very cold (in the 20s; I don’t run when it’s colder, which is rare in New York City anyway), and whether it is cold or very cold, I like that in the winter there are fewer people running in the park with me. (Where do so many of the other runners go in December? Are they all at the gym, or warm at home?) I like my solitude, and I like hearing my own breath in that solitude. I like the low winter sun, long shadows, and mottled skies. I like the bare trees.

December has begun, and the trees are not yet bare. I like the maples the best, the red ones that are redder than any red I’ve ever seen, as well as the ones that burn orange and red-orange. Ginkgos are the brightest yellow, maples the most saturatued in any color, and sweet gums the most astonishing, like a tree I dreamed up in kindergarten. Imagine! A tree whose star-shaped leaves turn all colors, even purple! I love all the colors, I desperately love them, and if my mind had the power to conjure a wind to blow them all away, I would already have done so.

The trees are not yet bare in December, and what can I do? I do my best to love things as they are—after all, could I ever really tire of the red of the maples?—but things as they are are out of season, or diminished, or broken, and sometimes these days my spirit collapses as though into a black hole of sorrow, and I cry with a terrifying fervor. Because I am older now than my mother ever lived to be, and what am I doing with my time? How much can I do in a day, in a week, in a year? How much grief can I hold? How much suffering can I alleviate? Can I alleviate any suffering at all?

I see now that I will never recover from the last couple years. Or from the four years before that. Or from the bewildering years of learning to be a mother to my children, or of figuring out how to survive in New York City, or of all the many ways I have deprived myself of sleep. Meanwhile, I tell myself that things are fine, just fine, look how beautiful this messed-up world is, which is maybe true sometimes but more often a lie, a form of spiritual bypassing. To love the world is to be often overcome with grief. My greatest wish now is to learn how to function—how to take care of things, make art—even in this grief.