Growing up outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where the weather often switches from one season to the next in the blink of an eye, I spent many childhood Septembers praying for what my area calls an "Indian Summer" -- an unusual and welcome extension of August warmth well into the time when the Autumn chill should have been blowing in on an evening wind. In grade school Indian Summers meant more warm nights spent playing outside before sunset, more chances to catch fireflies on my fingertips and marvel at their glow; in college, it meant more time to wear short flowy dresses and walk along the Georgetown waterfront at sunset with my best friends, Haagen Daaz ice cream cones in hand. Every September I would will Mother Nature to slow down a bit, to get a little lazy and let the summer heat stick around for one more week, and then another, and another.
It's no longer summer here in India, but you'd never know it. Supposedly we're smack dab in the middle of the rainy season, yet I can count on two hands the number of actual storms I've seen occur in the past two and a half months. For the past two weeks, the temperature has been above 90 degrees Fahrenheit almost every day, and that's not even factoring in the sweltering humidity and sunlight. Everyday in class with friends or over dinner with my homestay family there's hopeful talk that the next day will be the long awaited one when the rains bring cool relief, or when the weather finally transitions (almost three months late) and the temperature drops to 80 degrees and never pops back up again. My Indian friends inform me that at this time last year they were wearing jackets to class in the morning -- instead I find myself breaking into a sweat just minutes after I leave the house at 8:30 AM.
My lifelong love of "Indian Summer" has vanished and made way for a desperate and heartwrenching longing for Autumn, ushering in along with it the first real wave of homesickness I've felt since beginning my study abroad experience. Sure, I've felt twinges of homesickness here or there since I left DC in July -- missing my parents terribly the first few weeks, my roommates and close friends when the quiet solitude of my room became too much. But I could have never prepared for the overwhelming sadness I would feel from something as simple and as small as the absence of a season. This week as I saw friends' Instagram and Facebook posts commemorating the Autumnal Equinox, I was overcome by a whirlwind of emotions and the realization that it had been so long since I had felt any sort of cool weather that I had practically lost sense of time, forgetting not only that it was late September but that my favorite season, Fall, even existed. Forgoing homework and socialization I became obsessive, spending an hour or two looking through old photos of DC foliage, of Halloween parties and pumpkin flavored treats I had baked, looking up Autumn-themed recipes on Pinterest that I'd never find the ingredients for here.
Before I knew it, my longing for Fall had transformed into full-blown homesickness. Abandoning my India photo album on Facebook, I began uploading dozens of pictures left over from my Sophomore year at GW. In the auto rickshaw ride to school I blasted party playlists from last spring through my headphones; I watched India whizz past to the tunes of "Flawless" and "Anaconda," songs I hadn't even liked when they were popular but which now intoxicated me simply because they were so apart from my life here. I shoved all of my kurtas and salwars to the back of my wardrobe and began rotating through the two or three western outfits I had with me, suddenly the only things I could bear to put on in the morning.
But nothing I did seemed to make me feel any less restless. I gradually came to realize that homesickness can take different forms for different people. For me, homesickness isn't the great, deep ache for certain people or even a certain place, but rather, it was a peculiar melancholy for the little things that had mostly gone unnoticed in my old life, but which the absence of here in India felt like a gaping hole.
Little things like the feeling of thick woolen socks hugging my feet to shut out an Autumn chill; the lazy exhaustion of a cold rainy day that prompts me to sneak back to my dorm room between classes and take a nap, and later waking up to the sound of raindrops pattering on old bricks, the damp chill seeping in through my open window; peeling whitewashed wood on doorframes and windowsills and bed posts; the feel of my hand cramping around a wooden spoon handle as I mixed a thick cookie dough; the taste of a warm pumpkin spice latte seeping into my tongue, spicy and sickeningly sweet and dark all at the same time; the strap of an overweight grocery bag cutting painfully into my palm as I trek back to my room after a successful grocery shopping trip, weighed down by fresh produce and sweet treats; feeling my nose and fingertips warm back to life after coming back inside from a frigid Autumn night; breaking into a cold sweat on a brisk, windy morning as I run along the foliage-bordered canal in Georgetown, the calls of the GW and Georgetown rowing teams blowing in off the Potomac.
Little pieces of home, tiny moments, feelings, tastes, and smells that can't be captured or recreated in India, or anywhere for that matter. As much as I miss them though, I wouldn't give up this opportunity for even a day to have them back in my life. Because one of the unexpected beauties of studying abroad is the overwhelming love it makes you feel for what you left behind, and the knowledge that when the day comes to leave the incredible life you've created here, there will be a thousand lovely little beautiful things waiting for you when you step off the plane.