Year's Times

Easter dresses, sunburns, grief, and the passage of time

Nine years ago today, pre-sunburn

It’s not the first time or the last that my title comes from the Swedish word for a thing. In Swedish seasons are year’s times. Årstider. Like an airport is a flying place and a hospital is a sick house. They know how to call a spade a spade over there (also true literally, because the Swedish word for spade is - you guessed it - spade).¹ I am a little in love with the economy and practicality of this. And maybe also that there is no practical or logical reason for me to be studying Swedish in the first place.

I have been seeing Easter pictures for a week. Easter can come as early as March 22, though that has not happened since 1818 and will not happen in any of our lifetimes². But Easter happening in March? Not all that unusual. And I always take pictures on Easter, so the pictures are always there, the reminders of Easters past.

I have been seeing honeymoon pictures for three days. Nine years snd two days ago, Mike and I leave for our honeymoon. We take pictures at the airport, having a drink at whatever time it is because time does not exist in airports. For drinking anyway - it does exist for the doors to your plane shutting, the speech about your seat cushion being a floatation device and putting your own oxygen mask on first before assisting small children, and your plane taking off into the sky. But time does not exist when you have plenty of time to make it to the gate and you are having a martini (Mike) and a something tropical (me) at 10:30 am. Time does not exist for the days we are gone, sailing on the ocean, zip-lining through the rainforest, touching the locks for luck in the Panama Canal.

But every April the pictures roll around again, part of the årstider. Today I am fifty-one and it is Easter. Only forty and it is Easter then too. And I am standing with my husband pre-sunburn, on the deck of the Equinox, and I am forty-seven. Our bathing suits are new. The pictures all say the same thing which is that

It used to be different.

In what feels like another lifetime, you had another family and all your children were still at home. There you are with your ex-husband wearing a smile that does not reach your eyes and you don’t even notice, because this is the life you know and you are unaware that there will be any other.

Your smile does not quite reach your eyes on Easter 2021 either. No one goes to church in person yet and your dog died the day before. Everyone smiles dutifully but looks sad, because we all are.

No one’s smile is fake or dutiful wearing a new bathing suit, nine years ago. Nine years ago Mike asks the woman sitting next to us to take our picture. He says “Thank you, ma’am,” and she asks if we are form Texas, because of the ma’am. My husband laughs and says no, the ma’am is from the Marine Corps.

We get sunburned because we talk to this woman and her husband for six hours. We get sunburned even though we reapply sunscreen. It is April, on the Caribbean. We get sunburned because we talk politics. It is the other husband who mutters something under his breath - I can’t remember what, now - and his wife, who has just been ma’amed by my husband quickly shushes him because his politics are likely not compatible with a retired Marine who is not from Texas but says Ma’am. And are maybe surprising coming from an older Air Force vet who served in Vietnam. But surprise! We all agree. None of us know that we will talk for hours and get sunburned. None of us know that this man will say things that help my husband materially, say things that make me feel emotional in a coffee shop nine years after the fact.

You just never know.

I don’t think it is a bad thing, looking back and remembering that it was different. That it was Easter and you had a different family, that your dog had just died and your husband was not yet three years in the ground himself, or that one year you were about to talk politics and get sunburned. Good news: the Rain forest is shady!

Us, the next day

It is not a bad thing to think about this every April, not even if I get wistful when I see that picture of us in the airport, or the one I take at the hotel that night where we are beaming on a patio. Or.

It’s just not the worst to envy past you or pity past you or remember anything about past you. It doesn’t mean there’s not a present or future you. You can visit and remember the past without living there anymore. You can make meaning from it every April, if you want to.

There is such a thing as moving on too fast - or - there is for me. I am nineteen years old, newly married, and have just moved to Santa Barbara. I am looking for a part time job I can do while I go to school, and when I am interviewing at B. Dalton³ I let them know my mom is about to die and I will need to leave for the funeral. I say this matter of factly and it is a little horrifying, actually. I assure them I am fine because I think I have already accepted this, because I don’t know that I’ll be thinking about this moment thirty-seven years later, knowing I had not even begun to process the magnitude of this loss.

It is okay to experience this over and over again with the årstider. To see my young children and step-children dyeing eggs and standing outside church, to remember a smaller me in a new dress with a new stuffed bunny in my arms and a hollow, white chocolate one in my Easter basket. To see the present, a new Easter basket for Lucy in my kitchen with no candy in it because she can’t eat any yet, and the future next year when - maybe - she might be able to say Granny. To think that maybe I should sail again in April. We were always better with the sunscreen, after that.

It is just one of the year’s times, after all.⁴

1. but they would say that like spahd-eh.

2. unless you’re still alive in 2285

3. remember B. Dalton?

4. Not to get too into the weeds here (too late), but I don’t really know if it is year’s times or years’ times, because Swedish does not use apostrophes to express possession. So it is each year and also all of them, I guess.