Dear Friend,
Fun fact: Because 2024 is a leap year, the Spring Equinox falls on the evening of March 19, the day I am writing this.
At this moment, our home is a perfect temperature. Our apartment, the top floor of a Spanish upper-lower duplex, has the benefit of spaciousness, and the deficits of no central air conditioning and bad insulation. In the summer, we simmer and wilt and in the winter we shiver. But on ideal spring days, the sun adds brightness to rooms without beating down upon us, the nights are cool and pleasant with a couple of blankets.
At my current gig, we are in pre-production. I’m working most days from home, attending virtual meetings, responding to emails and texts, making plans and conveying them in more emails and texts. The light but constant rainfall of communication fills my days but isn’t stressful.
When I’m driving, walking or cleaning, I’ve been listening to the audio version of a series of fantasy books about a human girl who ends up in a faerie realm during some dark days. She becomes part of political machinations, goes on high-risk missions and endures painful consequences, witnesses evil deeds and war. But interspersing these episodes, the author does a good job of depicting periods of rest, recovery and relative happiness. She gets to enjoy time with friends and lovers in pleasant environments. These idyllic moments have a narrative purpose— making us like and invest in the characters so that when their happiness is in jeopardy, we will feel it more keenly. But it’s also just fun to hang out with them.
In some stories, when characters survive peril and believe they have reached their happy ending, the more experienced audience or reader feels tension, because happy, oblivious characters are a sure cue that some kind of monster (literal or metaphorical) will come crashing through a wall at any moment. It is actually a reprieve from that tension that the characters in this book hold the worldview that their past suffering does not exempt them from more suffering coming down the pike. But they also voice the belief that it is worthwhile to enjoy moments of respite.
Very soon, I’ll be busy and stressed, consumed with shooting the last shots of my film, doing taxes, waking in the wee hours to commute for the shows I am producing at work. At this moment in the world, wars are raging and people are suffering. Bad leaders are winning elections, and our own elections are coming. Extreme weather events are the harbingers of more to come. Old age and illness await people I love and myself, as they do everyone. And in true story fashion, this list of events that I can predict does not absolve me from blows I do not expect at all.
All the more reason to take joy in a sunny spring day.
I love reading your posts. They make me think and that makes me happy even when it’s not the first day of spring. 🥰