CREATIVE NONFICTION
DANIEL OLIVIERI
OFF SEASON
The beach in Winter feels like a party after all the guests have gone home. The lifeguard towers are lifeguardless, the boardwalk shops are boarded up, the population that swelled to 20,000 in July has ebbed to just 850. Even the seagulls have migrated. Yes, the beach is empty, but this is my favorite type of emptiness. Is there anything more intimate than being the ghosts of a ghost town? The ones who don’t so much inhabit the town as haunt it? When they were 19, my mother Olivia and her boyfriend Bryan spent a January weekend as the ghosts of Stone Harbor. This was after my Mom’s first semester at Barnard when she’d spent so much time talking to Bryan that she had to pawn her jewelry to pay her phone bill. Before that they went skiing together and he bought her a bright orange coat, “So I can keep track of you in all that snow.” Understand that during the weekend they spent together in Stone Harbor walking on dunes of sand covered in dunes of snow, they were as far as one could possibly be from Winter.
If we want to understand why, our first task is to go down to the dock and untie every knot that moors Winter to December, to January, to February. The Inca would celebrate Inti Raymi, their festival to greet Winter, on the 24th of June. In Auckland, in Johannesburg, in Rio, Winter belongs to August, to July, to June. Though I’m sure certain Scandinavians may ask whether the term Winter belongs there at all (temperatures rarely reach below 46°F in Melbourne; Capetown hardly ever sees snow). Winter displaced from its particular months feels backwards at first, counterintuitive, the way that the tundra is a desert or a tomato is a fruit. But Winter isn’t only unattached to those three months, but to months at all: Winter on Neptune lasts forty years. At bottom, Winter is a relationship between a sun and a hemisphere. The only thing you need to make one is an axial tilt.
So now that we’ve unmoored Winter from the way it lands on our hemisphere, from its relationship to our town, to the planet on which we happen to live, we can understand that no matter how cold they felt, they did not know Winter. Why? Because alone together in that near deserted town, this was their Summer solstice, their warmth for each other at its peak.
But their relationship had an axial tilt. There are those with no axial tilt. My sister, for example. Or Venus. Let them spin for eons and they’ll never know Winter or Summer. Bryan and Olivia were the opposite. The price they would pay for their relationship’s Summer was: Winter. When she broke up with him, he walked miles on foot to check himself into a psychiatric clinic. Decades later, he would say that the reason he’d turned down his admission to Harvard was because he thought she’d be too jealous (my Mom and I decided that we didn’t believe this). But I’ll let her speak for herself. In a letter, she wrote:
The beach in Winter feels like a party after all the guests have gone home. The lifeguard towers are lifeguardless, the boardwalk shops are boarded up, the population that swelled to 20,000 in July has ebbed to just 850. Even the seagulls have migrated. Yes, the beach is empty, but this is my favorite type of emptiness. Is there anything more intimate than being the ghosts of a ghost town? The ones who don’t so much inhabit the town as haunt it? When they were 19, my mother Olivia and her boyfriend Bryan spent a January weekend as the ghosts of Stone Harbor. This was after my Mom’s first semester at Barnard when she’d spent so much time talking to Bryan that she had to pawn her jewelry to pay her phone bill. Before that they went skiing together and he bought her a bright orange coat, “So I can keep track of you in all that snow.” Understand that during the weekend they spent together in Stone Harbor walking on dunes of sand covered in dunes of snow, they were as far as one could possibly be from Winter.
If we want to understand why, our first task is to go down to the dock and untie every knot that moors Winter to December, to January, to February. The Inca would celebrate Inti Raymi, their festival to greet Winter, on the 24th of June. In Auckland, in Johannesburg, in Rio, Winter belongs to August, to July, to June. Though I’m sure certain Scandinavians may ask whether the term Winter belongs there at all (temperatures rarely reach below 46°F in Melbourne; Capetown hardly ever sees snow). Winter displaced from its particular months feels backwards at first, counterintuitive, the way that the tundra is a desert or a tomato is a fruit. But Winter isn’t only unattached to those three months, but to months at all: Winter on Neptune lasts forty years. At bottom, Winter is a relationship between a sun and a hemisphere. The only thing you need to make one is an axial tilt.
So now that we’ve unmoored Winter from the way it lands on our hemisphere, from its relationship to our town, to the planet on which we happen to live, we can understand that no matter how cold they felt, they did not know Winter. Why? Because alone together in that near deserted town, this was their Summer solstice, their warmth for each other at its peak.
But their relationship had an axial tilt. There are those with no axial tilt. My sister, for example. Or Venus. Let them spin for eons and they’ll never know Winter or Summer. Bryan and Olivia were the opposite. The price they would pay for their relationship’s Summer was: Winter. When she broke up with him, he walked miles on foot to check himself into a psychiatric clinic. Decades later, he would say that the reason he’d turned down his admission to Harvard was because he thought she’d be too jealous (my Mom and I decided that we didn’t believe this). But I’ll let her speak for herself. In a letter, she wrote:
I won’t and don’t want to say I love you because there’s not an ounce of meaning there. It’s an [unintelligible] to use a word like that. For you. I’m going to end this and mail it even though I shouldn’t. After all, this will be tossed aside with a snicker. Maybe you’ll do some math calculations on the back, or set it aflame; you have a good imagination. Oh so well, I give up. Goodnight, Bryan. Wordless Goodnight. (I checked the back. There were no math calculations there.)
The only way to understand the beach is to visit it when there's no warm sand to meet the instep of your feet, the beach at its least beachy; the only way to have any chance of understanding a mother is to see her at her least motherly. To untether her from the woman who read you Tom Sawyer when you were sick and founded a puppet theater on a whim. To see the girl in the orange jacket, the one who sold her jewelry for the telephone bill, the one who wrote
letters she expected to be set on fire. To see her in a different season of her life.
letters she expected to be set on fire. To see her in a different season of her life.
Daniel Olivieri is a software developer living in Philadelphia. He enjoys late night conversations and fried plantains. Email him at [email protected].
Daniel Olivieri is a software developer living in Philadelphia. He enjoys late night conversations and fried plantains. Email him at [email protected].
