Warmy/Coldy

Inhabiting liminal spaces

As the saying goes in Maine—where I am thrilled to spend part of most summers—if you don’t like the weather, wait fifteen minutes. The island where we go is shaped like a butterfly and can be a mercurial being, with ecosystems: the wing where we stay might be veiled in grey fog while the other is sunshine bright and clear. Some days I step out and the air feels warm; I’m even sweaty as I head out for a walk through the woods to the sea. Then, while perched on some rock ledge, the wind picks up and a bank of clouds in the distance approaches and there I am, freezing my butt off, feeling like an idiot because I didn’t pack another layer.

This happened once while I was out kayaking with a friend. As we pushed off, the water rolled out like a sheet of metallic silk and we paddled with enthusiasm towards a small island. My arms felt strong. I thought, I can go for hours like this. And then fifteen minutes of energetic paddling later, that wind came rushing along, fighting us, whipping up white caps. We made it back, but I didn’t love being that terrified and also freezing.

This kind of weather is what Clark calls warmy-coldy, a descriptor of in-betweenness that makes perfect sense to us. He likes to quote his dad (cue Wisconsin accent and droll delivery): “if you have it with you, you can always take it off, but if you don’t have it with you…” Clark trails off here, but you get the idea.

It’s dark early here in the Hudson Valley, in these weeks leading up to the very shortest day. Sunset pink clouds at just past 4pm. I have set up our gloriously fake holiday tree and hung as many ornaments as possible on its silver tinsel branches. Outside, the grass is still green, but the leaves are down except for a few tough rustling stragglers. This opens up the view and the possibility of clarity at year’s end.

I dream of being a hibernating animal, while Clark complains about the pile of quilt and blanket I require for a satisfactory winter nest. He likes a crisp cold sheet next to his skin. “It’s heating and cooling simultaneously,” he tells me. Sometimes he’ll sing me a made-up jingle about the warmy-coldy features of the perfect bedding, a riff on a local TV ad from his childhood.

One needs to plan ahead, anticipate the unknowable, the situation that might be warmy-coldy. But of course, this isn’t always possible, in fact, hardly ever. In the in-between places, shrouded in unknowable fog, visibility is poor and a spirit might hover before it evanesces. I have stepped into this kind of liminal space following the deaths of people close to me, where for a time I lived in a ghost story, having conversations with a departed person, trying to relitigate arguments or offer them love. It’s like those odd moments when you think about someone far away or from a faraway time and you have the sense that they are surely thinking about you in that very same instant, as if you are connected by a thread, almost invisible, yet strong, like the spider’s silk that inspired the name of this Substack.

Lately, I’m trying to read my soul’s temperature so that I can muddle through this in-between time until the days begin to stretch out again. My instinct is to eat dinner at 5pm, take a warm bath, get into pajamas and under covers with a good book or a binge-worthy series. I’m finding mysteries quite satisfying. A crime is committed, a solution is found. In some cases, the perpetrator is found but never pays the price. The ending is not always fair or just—sometimes it is gray and muddled—and yet somehow, life still goes on and we persist. Some of my garden plants have already set buds, ready and waiting for the first warm days a few months from now.

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P.S. On January 7, at 3pm ET, I’ll be a book club guest speaker on the website Qesher, a forum for all aspects of Jewish life and history, to talk about my memoir Eva and Eve. You can register for this free event on the Quesher website. Two days later, on January 9 at 3pm ET, I will introduce Michael Simonson of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City, who will present a fascinating history of Jewish life and culture in Vienna. There will be an opportunity for audience Q&A at both events.

P.P.S.: Hello Sarasota, Florida! I’ll be teaching a five-day writing workshop focused on scene writing in memoir: January 27-31 from 10 am-12pm, at the wonderful Bookstore 1. The bookstore has a packed line-up of other events, including many featuring banned books. See link above to register.

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THANK YOU for reading and I’d love to hear from you! More posts each Friday at noon. I hope you’ll subscribe (paid subscriptions help support independent writing on Substack!) and share with other readers. You can find out more about my memoirs Perfection and Eva and Eve here and purchase here. I work privately with writers on creative non-fiction projects. If you are interested, you can contact me through my website: juliemetz.com. A first consultation is free of charge.

All written content © Julie Metz 2024