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Spring has arrived.

September, formerly the time of pumpkin spice and football, is now longer days and perfumed air. A half-decade of this reversal and it’s still a bit strange, to be experiencing the opposite of what we used to know–of what our families and friends across the world are experiencing.

But the same could be said of the lockdown we experienced last year, globally, and the one we experience this year, locally. Of our inhibited travel while I watch friends on Instagram hop flights to Italy. Meanwhile, I exult in discovering Rick Steves on YouTube, and I travel with him to Positano without leaving my bed (that sounds wrong, but you get it).

There’s a stretch on my morning run route, between Manly and Shelly Beaches, populated by brightly-coloured gates and cafes, and it feels European. I pretend I’m in Capri: the coffee to my right, the sea to my left.

This is the most we get right now.

It’s somewhere between nothing and everything, but far from both. It’s the memory of what we once had and the promise of what is to come, both only hinted at and surviving upon wisps of hope. It’s waiting to see where the debris lands even as we look around at what still stands. We are in the eye of some kind of hurricane, of a fire not yet dissipated, wondering what will need to be rebuilt–how we might be rebuilt. Right now, everything is foreign.

This is convenient, in a way, for those of us who have faced our own forms of trauma, who have been counselled through the repetitive unexpected of our stories. It doesn’t mean we’re fine–I mean, for my part, I broke the dryer last week after slamming the door shut so hard that something broke off and now it only stays shut during the cycle if it’s duct-taped–but it’s a language we’ve spoken some dialect of before, its words both unfamiliar and an echo, new and bearing recognition.

Spring hasn’t always come in September, but it has always come after winter.

We ran into some friends at the park last week, and The Kid and Little Brother ran up to the girls they’ve known since we arrived, who match their ages exactly, and wrapped them in hugs. The older sister turned to me and explained what I already know–and she does too–about TK: “He doesn’t like it when I start the hug, but he’ll hug me if he starts it.” Learning his language. And LB, this force of nature, he rattles off stanzas-long rhymes, freestyle-raps his way through the afternoon as though he’s been enrolled in one-on-one instruction with Lin-Manuel Miranda, and there was a time when it shocked and amazed me; now it’s just amazing. And known.

We are waiting, and living, and knowing.

TK and I, while LB sings beside us, talk real estate–his current top interest–and as LB performs a rap interlude, TK says to me: “We both like real estate–another thing in common!” Because he’s keeping track. We take turns putting them each to bed: LB, on my night with him, whispers in his half-sleep, as I walk away, that he loves me in response to my utterance of the same. On my night with TK, I talk him through some situation from the day and tell him that even though it doesn’t always feel this way, it’s true: there will always be someone who understands. He pauses, then says, in recognition, “That’s you.”

Both of them saying the same thing in different languages.