Now, when we moved to Georgia, the state was experiencing one of the worst droughts in its history. Rainfall was at a record low for the first three years we lived in the state. I understand this on an intellectual level, but nevertheless I was left with a very distinct meteorological-based transplant shock. I'd felt like I'd moved to the Southwest, where it was just hot and sunny and dry all the time. Yes, it's gotten better in the last few years, but its still nowhere near as wet as I grew accustomed to from Ohio.
 |
| Some are considerably less enthused about rain. |
Now, there are some reasonable explanations for some of it. For instance, it has been over 100 degrees this last week, so the front that is bringing the rain is cooling us down a bit, too. Likewise, my lawn needs some water before it gets too brown and dusty. Also, I'm happy that it's raining now, during the week, and not on the weekend when the wife and I are trying to get the outside of the house painted.
Really, though, I think it just makes me feel nostalgic. I don't know if "dreariness" is something that should make one wistful, but for me it does. I suppose we can be conditioned for anything, and in Ohio, you have no choice but to get used to precipitation. And when your childhood involved as much make-believe as mine did, I suppose its only natural that a connection be formed.
I suppose the question I would pose all the rest of you creative types out there: are there environmental factors that help or hinder your work? If so, what are they? Let me know, so I can figure out if this is normal or I'm just odd.
Even though I left Cleveland over a decade ago, my imagination still lives there. It's where I want to go when I feel like taking photographs. It's where my stories want to be set. It's where I feel like I'm among my people.
ReplyDeleteThe book I'm writing now takes place a half a mile from the house where I grew up. Like Willa Cather's Nebraska, I find Cleveland's almost a character, rather than a setting. The weather finds its way into every chapter, because in Cleveland, the weather is a huge part of your life - either you're clinically depressed because you haven't seen the sun in a month, or you're constantly damp from the thick layer of filthy slush all over everything, or you're boiling hot without the hope of a breeze, or you're battling millions of tiny, disgusting midges (yes, I am willing to say those bugs are a meteorological phenomenon). I think that being back there would actually be detrimental to my writing about it though. It's not just the weather that changes every five minutes. You blink, and the ghetto has been gentrified, and the suburb where all the rich people used to live is the ghetto. The coffee shop becomes a wig shop and the wig shop becomes a drug front and the drug front gets busted and now it's just another junk shop. So I'd never be able to get the place to hold still long enough to write about it, so it's better writing about it from the snapshots in my memory.
Although, I gotta say, Google Maps street view is an excellent tool when plotting out the locations of scenes. It's easier to invent the flesh of a place when there's a skeleton to hang it from.
I do a lot of romanticizing about the ol' homestead. I know that I don't actually want to move back, but sometimes I still think I do. Mostly I miss the lake and the surrounding patches of woods and parks. We don't have anything like that conveniently nearby. And I'm sad to think that my children are going to grow up learning to swim in a pool, and not the local lake. I like the image of the snapshots of memory; I think those end up being far more useful than reality. Especially when writing, where that tint of nostalgia can infect the reader as well.
Delete