Something melancholy from Charles Baxter's novel The Feast of Love, set in Ann Arbor. It's a moody meditation on love, and reading it feels like walking around a neighbourhood at night and imagining all of the conversations and love affairs and broken hearts in each house.
In February the overcast sky isn't gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It's a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you're inside, the snow clings to your psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely.
It was February when I read Feast of Love, fed up with the cold and the grey and salt-stained shoes and jeans, but the winter gloom wasn't a patch on how I feel now. I'm sad that I won't see Ann Arbor in summer, when the undergraduates vacate the town and the arts and music festivals fill the streets with locals. I'm sad I'll no longer have the run of an elite university, its visiting lecturers, its libraries and its cultural programs. I'm sad to say goodbye to so many new friends, whom I cannot imagine having to live without. And I'm sad that all hope of going back to a better workplace is gone - looks like it's going to be the same old disheartening place and no amount of inspiration gained here can change that, or my prospects there.
Enough self-pity: we're on the road for the next two weeks seeing Toronto, Montreal, New England and Boston. We'll visit cheeseries in Vermont and walk the Maine coastline and hopefully see some gorgeous countryside before we have to leave the USA. And the food is promised to be great.
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