it's winter, huh?

I don't like winters. I never NEVER regretted not having a single cold day or a single snowflake for two years in Rwanda. In fact, I was disappointed when it got to be beautiful weather in Michigan because then my mom would send me email saying, "It's such nice weather here!" and I would think, "I am supposed to have a monopoly on perfect weather here in the most beautiful place in the world! Michigan is supposed to be WINTER." (Yes, I freely admit the irrationality.)

I loved living in Kibuye and walking out into the sunshine on my stone patio nearly every morning and watching the rain clouds build over the Hotel Golf Eden Roc and then pass over the water and my house and on to Congo. I loved the fact that in rainy season it usually only rained for a few hours and after the rain passed I could climb up the hill and the clouds would clear and I could see Nyiragongo spewing out smoke against the grey-violet sky. One night I walked down the peninsula behind Bethanie as a storm was just passing, with Kivu, who was Maureen's dog at the time, back when Kivu was still allowed out (before she bit people) and walked off to the side through a field and sat at the edge of the water where the waves (there aren't usually many waves, it's a lake. but this day there were waves) were crashing onto the rocks and I sat there on the top of the rocks reveling in the wildness of nature and the dog's snuffling around and the water that splashed up onto me.


Anyway, it's sunny a lot more often in New York than in Michigan, which is not surprising because Michigan is one of the least sunny places on earth. Seriously. It can go for two months at a time without so much as a sliver of sunlight. It did this while I was in high school. And for the forty-five days preceeding January 7 (note that this is when I was in West Michigan), I heard that West Michigan was the cloudiest place on earth. So it's sunnier in New York. But sometimes I look out the window and forget that it's cold out there. The smog rests over the skyline like the dust in Rwanda in dry season. I'm filled with longing and I wonder if maybe I could just go back to Rwanda this summer and live in Kibuye in my old house.

I won't. I will do something else and travel to new places. But I think it will be a long time before I stop missing my old house in Kibuye, for the lake with its clear water and the hammock between two trees in the front and the way the sunlight was sifted through the trees and the sound of the rain at night when I thought the hill might crash down on me and the friends who came to watch movies on my computer and cook on the two-burner hotplate and swim across to the biopreserve.