If we could market love, how would we package it so that the careless do not break it, cold hearts never open it, and materialists do not devalue it to something worth less than the Zimbabwean dollar? Love that asks so little and that sometimes becomes so difficult to keep offering or to give. Love's soft finish that, again and again, prevents our days or our feelings from fraying away.

Love is like a change of season. Especially after summer or winter. It takes the bite out of the winter and the sting out of the summer. Love is like an in-between season that would gladly be the season in our hearts forever, but, because hearts have their own temperature, this is not possible.

The plot that the sun hatches with the temperature, to overthrow the whole system of summer in a coup to bring winter into power, is an urgent necessity for nature, but for the human psyche too. Because sometimes our inner landscape needs to feel the cold. How else do we understand another person's winter?

As the sun suddenly loses its impact to frighten us and the cold blows its breath over your heart, memories linger like dead leaves that refuse to fall from the branches of your memory. A homesickness soaked through with love — yesterday's love, today's love — holds you hostage. Homesickness becomes your heart's in-between season, full of melancholy that drives feelings into the arms of the next season. You linger at any meaningfulness that has to do with people and with times when you thought the season was your heart's own order and people the bearers of good news.

A backward glance like this lays bare ignorance, awkwardness, over-eagerness, but above all the passion with which we sometimes carry on so fanatically. In retrospect you discover moments of deception, moments of overblown innocence, good faith that was taken advantage of, and manipulation you were not a match for. In retrospect you sometimes come to know yourself best of all. Who you yourself know yourself to be, and not the person that others' opinions have decided over the years that you are.

In such an in-between-season moment you again bring up children, again bury grandmothers or grandfathers, again walk the little paths on a moonlit evening, again learn to dance, and let the memories of church hats and gloves, beach-bronze stockings and crimplene dresses call a sweet smile back to your lips.

For a well-rounded sum-total at the end of our life and our personality, we need every temperature with which our inner life is confronted.

The secret is not to blame the season, or the temperature of our heart, for what we experience, but to make sure we are warmly enough dressed.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer