In the fall of 2022, thanks to Spotify I stumbled upon a musical artist named Noah Kahan. Specifically his song “Stick Season” which is also the name of his album. In a time when I was desperately missing Boston, his songs which have heavy accents and references of New England felt like they transported me right back to Boston. When I run across something I love, I become obsessed…I suppose it’s my love language. I used to listen to him from the moment I woke up and in the car on my hour commute. I would come into work and stick in headphones to which I would listen to this album on repeat the entire day and then I would leave and get in my car where I would listen all the way home. I listened over and over for weeks, probably months if we are being honest.
I’ve never seen an artist more than once and certainly not in the same year or same tour. I’ve seen Noah twice this year and I have tickets for next year after I failed to get them at Fenway Park and Nashville…I kept looking for a chance and I found it…at a music festival. I swear I could put a down payment on a car with the money I’ve spent on tickets to see him and I’ll also swear it was worth every penny. I love Noah so much my ex-boyfriend and I broke up on a Friday and then we still went to his concert together on a Saturday because well…we can’t not go see Noah. I know it sounds awkward…but it was really one of the best nights of my life. You can hold the feelings of sadness of a breakup and the awe of Noah at the same time.
But I digress…one time I came across something I can’t remember if it was Noah himself or a fan or where it was or who said it…but they said that Stick Season is a real thing. You see Noah is from Vermont and so the lyrics go… “And I love Vermont but it’s the season of the sticks”. It is the time when the trees lie bare with no leaves but before the snow falls. I googled today what time of year stick season is and according to www.visitvermont.com “It starts somewhere between fall and winter; around late October to early December.”
It’s the weekends where I start making my way down my contacts list texting friends looking for someone to hangout with or something fun to do that reminds me how very alone I am.
Today is the day the time changes…the day when it starts getting darker earlier. Before I hit that Google, I was thinking about how this time of year feels emotionally like “stick season”. It feels like a dead season. The fun-loving of summer and the excitement of football games and pumpkin spice things is gone. I was already hitting the wall wishing to fast forward to Christmas two weeks ago. There is no time that really brings to your attention your singleness than this time of year. All summer and into the fall my weekends were packed and I was constantly on my way out of town. It was fun but exhausting and now life has slowed way down.
It’s the weekends where I start making my way down my contacts list texting friends looking for someone to hangout with or something fun to do that reminds me how very alone I am. It’s the nights watching Netflix movies by myself that make me wish I had someone to share my weekends with. My weeks are jammed packed to the brink with so much socialness that I can’t fit it all in but the weekends are dead like the trees in Vermont. Weekends are when couples and families spend quality time together and singles spend swiping through the dating apps for the millionth time.
This is my sixth season in a row like this and something about the rising number feels brutal. It feels like I’m so very tired of this. I’m tired of having a good attitude about it. At least last year, I’d been single so long I forgot what a relationship even was. I forgot the good parts of relationships but this year I spent half a year in a relationship and somehow that makes this year a little more cruel. It makes the sadness a little more raw. We did all the things right and still it didn’t turn out like we wanted it to. Love feels like a mythical dash of fairy dust that the world has to choose you to be so lucky to get. There’s nothing you can do to make it happen…it’s up to the Universe to decide you are worthy of such a blessing. I got close…I got really close to the fairy dust and then it eluded us and that just really sucks.
One day I’ll share a list of all the reasonable and somewhat unreasonable things I’ve done in my pursuit of love…my perspective is I’ll try any manifesting, book, spiritual slash crazy thing that worked for literally anyone anywhere. There’s this book called “Calling in the One”…go read the Amazon reviews…people swear by it. I first heard of it from Tanya Rad who got her happily ever after when completing the book. I joined a book club to do the book with strangers out of a Facebook group who became my friends. Four of us joined…three of us completed the book…and two of us got engaged. At this point, it just feels like life is rude but in the book she says something along the words of…Right before you meet the one, you’ll start having near misses. That’s the only comfort I have is that this was a near miss and I’m not sure I’ve ever had a near miss before. I can confidently look back and say…that I didn’t miss it. I am sure I made the right choices.
This is my sixth season in a row like this and something about the rising number feels brutal. It feels like I’m so very tired of this. I’m tired of having a good attitude about it.
I am sure I put myself out there…I am sure I did every ounce of everything in my power to run into my person. Heck, I moved across the country to the city I was sure held him and it didn’t…it held some amazing friends and amazing experiences but it did not hold romantic love for me. I make sure I go on at least 12 dates a year and many years many, many more to make sure I’m getting out there. I’ve joined every league and thing and hobby I love and hoped that if I just loved my life a lot then he’d show up and he hasn’t. This year I’m staring down my impending birthday…thirty-five. The year you’re officially categorized as a geriatric pregnancy and I had to start thinking about whether I want a child enough to do it on my own…I started thinking about how I keep my options open on this front…how I prepare for not meeting my person until I’m forty or what if not at all? These are the unspoken things you’re faced with when you’re single…the things no one talks about because then the judgement comes.
It’s stick season again and it sucks and I hate this time of year. I hate it vehemently. I hate that the things I was sure were coming this year did not show up. I hate that we’ve moved to needing two hands to count the years that we’ve been waiting and hoping that a great love does exist out there. It’s the hoping that feels necessary but also foolish. It’s something I just can’t give up on. I have to believe that it’s coming and I’ll push through another year believing. I’ll force myself into a good attitude and I’ll dig in even deeper into the life I’ve been given. I will scrape this season dry and take all that it has for me. I will listen to Stick Season (We’ll All Be Here Together) extended album on repeat…yes he gave us more songs since I first started listening. I will keep documenting this journey in the realest, rawest way I can for the whole internet to read because I know my story is going to be one of pure magic. It’s going to be a love story with God’s fingerprints all over it and in order for it to have impact…you need to know I never saw it coming. It needs to be documented and it needs to have timestamps. You need to know it really, really sucked until it didn’t and that I lived the happiest, best life while I was waiting on it but I also let myself have an hour here and there (like right now) to really feel how much it sucked…before I gathered my composure I woke up the next day and I made the most of the life I’ve been given.
The thing they don’t tell you is that while a New England stick season is followed up by a winter that feels like it lasts forever they have the most glorious summers, more beautiful full of magic than anywhere else and that’s the kind of love I’m looking for but you must bear the northern winter to get the beauty of the summer.