The wind howled all day and I feel anxious and edgy. There is a headache standing up behind my eyes and pressing out through my skull. Just a few days ago I was speaking confidently about how I had escaped winter depression this year. I have (I think) Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD, an apt acronym), which seems to come and go in cycles -- a few years when it is intense, November to March, followed by years where it is milder and covers a shorter period. I have one of those full spectrum lamps that is supposed to alleviate the symptoms if you sit in front of it for a half hour or so a day. It’s helped during the worst years. This year I didn’t even have to get it out of the closet.

It’s convenient to attribute an elevated mood to the lack of foul weather -- it’s been warm and sunny more than it hasn’t these past months. But it’s not cold or cabin fever that causes a winter depression -- it’s what Emily Dickinson called “a certain slant of light,” that weak northern light that’s all grays and blues, which might even be the origin for the meaning of the blues as despondency or low mood. And we have that here in Pennsylvania November to March no matter what.

I might be coming down with something. I don’t get sick very much now that I’m not exposed to large numbers of people in a poorly-ventilated school building, and I’d forgotten what it was like not to feel alert and sharp most of the time.

So I’m still experiencing fuzzy thinking, as I was last night, unable to focus on some of the topics I wanted to explore.

At times like this, when I’d like to write something but can’t collect the energy, I look for a list to make. I have a book, List Yourself: Listmaking as the Way to Self-Discovery by Ilene Segalove and Paul Bob Velick that I sometimes open at random to see what it might evoke.

Tonight I opened to this: List all the rivers you’ve crossed.

Ahh -- do we look at that literally or metaphorically? I could be here all evening listing irrevocable (or hard to reverse) decisions -- to get married (twice), to have a child, to not have a child, to drop out of a degree program, to leave a career. I could take the directive literally, get out a map, and list the actual waterways I’ve been on both sides of. But that, too, would raise its own metaphorical questions -- do we count the Mississippi, over which I have been conveyed only by plane? What about the circumstances that took me to the Ottauquechee at Route 4 in Vermont in 1974, and why have I never been back? -- a question that leads us to the metaphoric again.

I’ll complete the exercise tonight by listing three rivers I love, so much so that a picture of each hangs in my study.

The Liffey at Dublin, Ireland -- The River Liffey cuts through Dublin, and in the summer of 1994 I crossed it every day, on foot or in a bus, when I lived in a suburb south of the city while studying fiction writing at the Writers’ Centre just north of the river. Dublin means “black pool,” and here the river is usually darker and dirtier than it appears in this photo. James Joyce personified it as “Anna Livia.” One sport of tourists is to criss-cross the river on foot in one hike over each of the city spans, including the lovely Halfpenny Bridge seen in the foreground. I keep a large black and white photo of Anna Livia in my study, along with my bus pass from those weeks and a few Irish punt notes and coins in a little box on a table below. It means I’m going back.

The Point at Three Rivers, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania -- The Point is formed where the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers come together to form the Ohio. I have been to this place only twice -- in September of 1969 and again in the summer of 1993. Both visits are a part of my history that I have devoted more energy and ink to than I can possibly explain here. I’m going again, in October, if not before.

The Susquehanna at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania -- I live not far from this spot. From the ages of seven to fifteen I lived even closer, on a hill five blocks above it. I could see the river from my bedroom window as a silver ribbon threaded through rooftops. From the time I was fifteen until I was twenty I crossed it every day on my way to school. Now I live only a little north and east of where I did back then. This bench is my favorite spot, and I visit it frequently to pray, to exercise, to read. I have sat on this bench with everyone on earth I truly love. Thus I never really go there alone.

I began this as a nothing piece meant to be a place holder on a foggy day in mind and weather. It’s turned into something else.
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