“It was a beautiful season,” I said, and not for the first time, or the fourth or the fifth. I must have repeated that phrase dozens of times upon returning to my previous hometown. I was in an unfamiliar home. Not an unfamiliar feeling, though since, it was a place that I had lived for two decades but never felt quite like what people talk about when they talk about home.

I visited so many friends from the time that I lived there, that twenty years that I laid my head down in a house on the corner of a maple-studded neighborhood. There were some good times in those seasons. Hikes on the only mountain in town with a fellow mom carrying an infant the same age. Monthly gatherings in the homes of women who had each cooked a dish, where we shared our difficulties and triumphs both in and out of the kitchen. Trips to the barn to continue riding horses as I had done most of my life. Hard, sweaty, and exhausting weekends turning back the effects of time on our hundred year old house. Sitting on that same house’s porch with friends on the few weeks of the year it was comfortable to do so. Running before dawn in the middle of the streets of my neighborhood with fellow women willing to do such things. Walking the same path to the office and wondering if today would be the day it would implode or I would be called out for being unfit to help lead a company. Sitting in committee meetings to try and enact programs and policies that might make life better for fellow women and mothers.

So many of those seasons occurred concurrently. They encompassed parts of my life in that city. Not all of them ended well, through a fault of mine or otherwise. For a long time only that was visible to my memory. It’s only now, so many years removed, and also outside the physical environment in which they happened, that I can see them for the beautiful but gone seasons that they were.

The path from the parking lot to my office that I tread every day for at least a decade and the running trail to the river and back are littered with regrets. The things I told myself I should be doing. The person I wanted to be – or appear to be – that I could never quite make happen. It was easy, then, to only see them through a haze of regret. But now upon return, there was more.

In talking to these old friends, I found myself saying more than once – my god, that was a beautiful season. What times we had. Not all good, of course, but on balance the beauty is the thing that shone through. The light glinting off the waves of the river, not the murkiness of the water beneath.

Maybe it’s because I live somewhere with distinct seasons now. There’s an urgency to use the snow when it’s there because it will soon and certainly be gone in a time frame measured in months. Maybe knowing that I need to get out on the mountain today despite aches, pains, weather, and myriad other misgivings because it won’t be an option in a few months. Progression is a certainty, just like the thinning of the skin around my eyes and the thickening of my joints. The snow will melt just like my eyesight will blur. Best use the conditions right now.

What a season I had in my life in Tulsa. What a time I had. No, I didn’t do everything that I wanted to, but wonderful things filled that void. I didn’t appreciate those wonderful things then. But now, I can both remember and understand how lovely it was, like when I stood under a canopy of red-yellow-orange maple trees filtering the sunlight in a just-so way.