Season Change: Your Quarterly Reminder of the Passage of Time
Seasons change, time passes, things improve
One of the best things about New York is the reliability of the seasons. Four distinct seasons, like you learned them as a kid. Summer is hot. Winter is cold. Autumn is crisp and everything turns brown. Spring is fresh and everything turns green. How many seasons do we have in Ireland? Two? Overcast, damp and cold. Overcast, damp and a little bit less cold. You never put away your winter coat anyway, that’s for sure. Your raincoat gets as many outings in August as it does in January.
When we moved to New York, it was September and still summer. It was hot and it was humid, though New Yorkers laughed at us thinking it was hot. We rented a midtown apartment while we house-hunted and every morning, as we left for the day, the doormen would turn into Irish grandmothers as they looked into the buggy and asked: “Do you think they’ll be warm enough?” After five weeks in that short-term let, we moved into our longer-term apartment and by then it was October.
When you rent an apartment in the US, it comes unfurnished. Which was bizarre to me having rented in Ireland for 14 years and never having bought so much as a cushion or a decorative throw. (I tell a lie, I bought a €4.90 coffee table in IKEA in 2011. I loved that coffee table. I loved that it cost €4.90.)
You really don't realise how much sitting and lying and leaning you do all day until you’ve moved into a place with nothing but bare walls and floors. The baby was the only one of us happy because she had a high chair and a travel cot. We invested in a mattress as our single piece of furniture while we waited for the rest to arrive and the three of us slept on that mattress on the floor. I was living the J1 life I’d never done.
At the same time, our 3 year old got a spot in a nearby pre-school. Her first week in school was our first week in the bare apartment and on her first day, she had homework. Homework!! She had to do a project on herself. Now, when a 3 year old has to do a project, what actually is happening is that the parents have to do a project. And what we had to do was find nice photographs, develop them, buy paper, buy a scissors, buy glue. We had to then try teach her some basic facts about herself to present to her fellow 3 year olds.
The next day came a note saying that there was a Halloween parade on Friday if we could please send the children in costume and also go to the school mid-morning to watch them walk, in their costumes, around the block. Do people here not have jobs, I wondered? How are they fitting all this in? Thankfully, there are costume shops EVERYWHERE at Halloween, so that was one thing that didn’t kill me. (Americans are so weirdly proud of their costumes for full outfits that they buy in a shop. Like OK man, ya I see you’re a hot dog but you bought it on Amazon, am I meant to be impressed? I want to see the blood, sweat and tears that went into your costume. I want the thought process, the personal story, a little word play perhaps. And if you don’t have any of those things, I want it to at least be a little bit shit.)
On the third day, the homework assignment was that we had to *not only* decorate a pumpkin but take pictures before decoration, during decoration and a family picture afterwards. Pre-school was supposed to be a welcome break but I thought I would lose my mind with the stress of the tasks the school kept firing at me. This was the assignment that was the step too far. Crafts are not my forte at the best of times but crafts in a house where we had not one thing…it was asking too much. Well not too much because we did it but we didn’t enjoy ourselves, not one little bit. You can see it in our eyes in the photo we had to send in.
Autumn turned into winter followed by the blooms of spring and the humidity of summer. Everything for us was a first. We had our first Thanksgiving, our first New York Christmas, our first American Saint Patrick’s Day, our first Fourth of July. We celebrated our birthdays for the first time in our new apartment. Our first turning on of the air con, first ice-creams from the pink trucks, first playground sprinklers.
And then the pumpkins appeared again outside the bodegas and the bakeries had signs out for Rosh Hashanah, as they did when we first arrived, and suddenly, I realised, I'd got through every season. Another trip around the sun, as the Instagram captions go. But this trip had been in New York. I was doing an American Halloween for the second time and what a different experience it was. Bring on the Fall festivals, the apple-picking and the pumpkin decorating. I could handle it now. All I’d needed was a couch.
I really loved this one!