So I'm from the Pacific Northwest of the US and Canada, and I've never been outside of it for longer than a month. Which means that for my entire life, there's been this unquestioned assumption in me, without my directly thinking on it, that each year of my life will consist of a warm summer followed by seven months of variations on cold, wet, rainy, and grey. You get the delicious rotten months of Autumn, followed by the lusciously dreary winter, and wrapped up with a soaking wet and hay-fever ridden spring.
And I love it. Summer is fine, it gives incentive to jump in the bitterly cold and salty ocean, or spend hours playing with the beautiful tidepool fauna, but not every day has the time and freedom to take you to the beach and frankly, beachless summer days are kinda just gloomy and rain-less and hot! But not so with the rest of the year, where it's cold and grey and wet day after day after day, and it's in that climate I really thrive.
This is a picture of me going for a walk in the rain, which I like to do on days when it is specially wet. The bugs around me aren't actually there, unfortunately, but I drew them in because I like bugs a lot and they were probably what I was thinking about on this walk, and they really just make the whole picture more accurate.
Anyways, I was running around today in the dry summer day, and thinking the usual end-of-summer thoughts of "oh boy, I sure can't wait for the rains to return" when it dawned on me that I wasn't going to be there this time. I'm going to be in India for the next eight months, and I know there's a winter where I'm going, but my point isn't about the season in name, rather, the season as it is here, where I've lived my entire life. And by the time I get back the wet season where I'm from will be just about over, and I'll be heading into another summer.
And that's totally alright. I'm really looking forward to everything about this trip, more so than I could possibly put into words right now. So I don't regret missing my favorite season at all, and there will be plenty more for me to experience in my life. But it was in the moment that I realized I was going to miss out on my winter that I think the reality and significance of this adventure really hit me for the first time. In a deeply tangible way, one of the core foundations of the world I know will be swept from under my feet, and while I'll miss it, that in and of itself is pretty exciting.
So, I'll be in India for a little while, and I'll be writing stuff and putting it on this blog. Which is why you should follow it, because then you'll get to get little updates about my life and experiences abroad. And I'll probably have much more interesting things to write about than, like, rain and stuff. If you know me already, you probably know I have some neat ways of thinking about things and a fun set of interests, but if you're here and you don't know me then, well, hopefully you'll overlook my casual tone of voice and say "hey, this girl seems cool, rain and bugs are good, I will read the words she writes" because hey, guess what? I'm a writer so I'm probably pretty good at this.
Okay that's all!
