Category Archives: Autumn

Temperature

20 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by in Autumn, Seasons, Spring, Temperature, Weather

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One of the things that has arguably been made too easy with the advent of cell phones in everyone’s pocket is checking the temperature. Given the strange seasons we have had in the past few years, I have developed the habit of checking my phone app first thing every morning, usually hoping for warm days. Usually, I find that the temperature is exactly what the same app said it would be when I checked it before going to bed last night.

There are several things we look toward as indicators of the seasons—increasing or decreasing sunlight; conditions like rain, snow, or ice; phenological occurrences such as plants greening, flowers blooming, animal activity; and of course, temperature. Of these, temperature affects us the most. Our lives in the modern world change very little in response to seasonal change. The modern food industry delivers strawberries to us in January and squash in April, so we can cook whatever we want in any season. Rain, snow, or ice all must be pretty severe to alter our daily activities. The few things we do reliably with the change of seasons are to change our costumes and turn on heat or cooling in our abodes–both responses to temperature.

It’s funny when we finally have the first moderately cool day after a long, searing summer, and you see women out in their sweaters and scarves, even though the afternoon temperature climbs to 80°. Just can’t wait to break out the warm woolies. It’s the same when the winter yields to a few warm days, and people throng the streets in shorts and T-shirts. You see kids the next day and the next walking to school in brief outfits, even though the temperature has returned to freezing. Our clothes are a statement, not just of fashion, but of our belief in what season it has become.

We have a conflicted relationship with the temperature. We obsess about what the temperature is: thus, the repeated checking of phone apps, and hanging onto every word from a local TV weather personality. Thirty-two degrees is a breaking point for us—is it above or below freezing? But really, anything from 33° to 40° does not feel that much different than 32°. Beer is considered nice and cold at 42°. We complain about the heat until it’s cold enough to complain about the cold. Almost everyone’s favorite season is either spring or autumn, the seasons with the most clement temperatures, and we long for their coming. And then we stay inside anyway.

When I was a boy our parents, and all the parents in our neighborhood, would sit outside on pleasant evenings, talking and watching us kids rollick through the block. Walking down most suburban streets on spring evenings these days is like visiting a ghost town. We’re not out in it, we’re inside: a new season of our show is starting, there’s a new special on Netflix. I recently read the observation from a British author that Americans are odd in that they will heat their homes in winter to temperatures they’d never tolerate in summer, and cool their homes in summer to temperatures they’d never tolerate in winter. I think he’s right—I have been in some icy living rooms in midsummer, and in homes that felt like proof boxes in winter. I just don’t know if Americans are unique in this; most people in the developed world have good heating and cooling systems. Are we alone in being so wasteful, so unaware?

If this is a problem, I’d say the solution is the same as I always prescribe: get out in it. Don’t even check the temperature, just throw wide the windows and see how it feels. Stick your head out the door. Plan different things according to the seasons. Cook different things in spring than you would in autumn. The temperature is an important measure of weather, but it’s also an artificial one. What one person thinks is too hot to be out gardening or picnicking may be your ideal afternoon. What one person thinks is a bitter cold day may feel to you like the best time for a brisk walk. We are not all the same, even if scientific measures like the Fahrenheit scale try to establish some uniformity.

You don’t have to play that game.

The Flattening, or Remoteness of the Seasons?

30 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by in Autumn, Climate Change, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Winter

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I have not written anything here in a while. There is a certain irony in the reason. I began writing this blog in support of my work on a book, which I call The Varied God, and which I have been working on for more years than I care to count. Over the past several years, there have been periods of time when I have written more blog posts than pages of the book. Writing a blog is more fun and more gratifying. I can count the number of people who read my posts, and carry on conversations with people who respond to them. That doesn’t happen with chapters of an unpublished book.

In the past few months I have been working on the book more, and it has been going well. I am working on Chapter 5, and since there are seven proposed chapters, that feels like real progress, especially since much of the research, and some of the actual writing for Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 is done.

Chapter 5 is about the influence of the seasons on art—music, painting, literature. There is a lot of it, because the four-season motif has been very popular for most of history. There are some outright masterpieces, like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons or Haydn’s Seasons oratorio, and some really schlocky pop stuff, like Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post illustrations.

A book I was reading about seasonal art used the phrase ‘flattening of the seasons,’ which I found interesting. It is the same phenomenon which I have observed but labeled the ‘remoteness of the seasons.’ What I mean, and what the other author meant, is that at one time most people lived an agrarian, largely rural existence. Their lives were necessarily ordered by the procession of the seasons. But as industrialization proceeded and more people migrated to cities and suburbs, we paid less attention to seasonal change. We didn’t have to. Throughout the 19th century, and even up until about the middle of the 20th century, we experienced a great nostalgia for nature and the seasons. Many people made careers of writing books, articles, even newspaper columns about the seasons—Edwin Way Teale, Hal Borland, Rachel Carson, Henry Beston, to name just a few.

But now, most people, and I fear it is predominantly younger people, don’t even have that nostalgia. The seasons are remote from their lives, so remote that they don’t even dress warmly in winter, they just dash from one heated indoor environment to the next. We eat pretty much the same foods all year, do the same things all year. That’s why I use the phrase ‘remoteness of the seasons,’ and while I don’t want to argue the appropriateness of the phrase ‘flattening of the seasons,’ I think it has come to mean something else.

Last week I put up a Christmas tree. It was very warm out, and did not feel ‘Christmas-y’ at all. Autumn was slow to come this year, the trees holding onto their leaves for so long. At the Botanical Garden the other day I noticed a ginkgo tree had dropped all its leaves, but they weren’t the usual golden brown. They were just a tired shade of green. Once the days got chilly enough to feel like autumn, we had another week of temperatures in the 70s. Many people have noted that we are losing our autumn and our spring. We just jump from winter to summer and back again. This is, I fear, an effect of the climate change that isn’t happening. This is, to me, what should be called the flattening of the seasons.

There need to be two terms with separate meanings. Remoteness of the seasons means the phenomenon of people experiencing the seasons less fully because modern amenities have made them irrelevant in day to day existence. Flattening of the seasons means the gradual loss of a full four-season climate règime.

Both scare me.

When Seasons Begin

25 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by in Astronomy, Autumn, Climate Change, Seasons

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Yesterday I spoke with my brother, and he told me that this past August was the hottest August on record, making for something like eleven months in a row now of the hottest months on record. This despite the fact that here in the Great American Midwest, it wasn’t a bad summer. I don’t know if the temperature ever hit 100°. People who don’t have the courage to face up to the reality of climate change will shrug and say ‘What global warming? It feels fine to me!’ It’s like saying ‘What increase in gun violence? I haven’t been shot yet!’

As with all scientifically verifiable conditions it’s not about what you see right in front of you, it’s what is statistically valid. That warmest August on record is a worldwide measure, not the measure for your hometown; and the fact that you can still sit comfortably on your patio in August drinking lemonade doesn’t mean that the Maldives aren’t rapidly being swamped by rising seas.

For me, one of the notable effects of climate change is in what feels like a shift of seasons. According to the date on the calendar, we should be in autumn. It started two days ago. But the temperatures have been in the 90s, the heat and humidity very summerlike. I see women out on the streets in wool skirts with big scarves around their necks. They are anxious to don their fall fashion finery, even if it means sweating beneath layers of warm clothing. Autumn is just not here yet, and it’s the last week of September.

Of course, we don’t expect the seasons to change automatically, as if someone throws a switch when the appropriate date arrives. We don’t even agree about which date to use. For a long time, in traditional terms, the seasons have been dictated by the dates of the solstices and equinoxes. But this can be an odd measure, since we can see a lot if wintery weather before the late December winter solstice, or be deep into spring well before the vernal equinox.

Back in 1780, in search of some kind of certainty, Elector Karl Theodor of Bavaria convened a group of meteorologists he called the Societas Meteorologica Palatina, charged with formalizing how weather and climate were studied. This group decided that the meteorological seasons would be defined by temperature, and designated as three-month periods beginning on the first day of the first month in which that season’s temperature pattern prevailed. Spring would run from March 1 to May 31, summer from June 1 to August 31. Even though the group only lasted until 1795, meteorologists still recognize these seasons.

But you see the problem: according to the meteorological definition, autumn should have begun September 1, and here it is September 25 and it still hasn’t come. But even as I’m typing this I look out the window to see a breeze riffling the leaves, which are all tinged with golden brown. There is rain predicted for this afternoon, the leading edge of a cold front. By tomorrow, we’ll all be digging into closets for our woolies and scarves.

Did you hear that NASA recently announced some interesting news regarding the signs of the Zodiac? For one thing, the ancient Babylonians, who basically created the Zodiac, named 13 signs, not 12. One was dropped when annual dating was being formalized into a 12-month calendar. Not only that, but due to shifts in the earth’s axis, it no longer points to the same constellations it did those several thousand years ago. Meaning, of course, that the sign you may believe rules your life is possibly not your sign at all.

Things change. People who can’t face up to the reality of climate change often say that the changes we are currently seeing (if they acknowledge them at all) are the same kind of climate shift that has happened before on our planet. It has naught to do with human activity. Okay, let’s say that’s true. So maybe we need to reevaluate and decide anew when our various seasons start. Say October 1 is the beginning of Autumn, and January 1 the start of winter. But these things, like the seasons on our planet and our reading of the stars in the sky, should be long term: that old Babylonian Zodiac was created long ago, even before most of the books of the Old Testament were written. If we change the dates when seasons begin today, how long will that last? How long will it even matter?

 

Autumn

04 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by in Autumn, Change, History, Seasons

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This morning the radio announcer notes that it is September 1, autumn is around the corner, and invites us to stay tuned in all seasons. Yesterday I stood on a friend’s balcony during a cool rain shower, looked at trees just beginning to take on fall color, and thought about the coming season. It is late summer. In the evening the cicadas make a persistent trill from the trees, and darkness closes in a bit earlier every night.

Much of the earliest religious practice humans indulged in was aimed at ensuring seasonal change. Demeter and her daughter Kore—transformed into Persephone, the ‘bringer of death,’ after her underworld episode—are as ancient as any deity we know. Even before there was a Zeus, there was a Demeter, and it seems obvious that to early humans, tracking the orderly flow of the seasons was more important than any Olympian hierarchy.

Dumuzi, Adonis, Attis and many other ancient gods and demigods died and were resurrected in spring or summer rituals, making sure that one season of abundance would follow on another, that the gods would never leave us to starve in a world without sun, without life-giving water, without warmth—what the Norse would come to think of as Fimbulwinter, three years of unbroken severe winter that would precede Ragnarök, the end of the world. In time, humans have learned one important lesson: the seasons are going to change, one following on another, and you can’t stop them.

Most people who have lived where there are four defined seasons do not want to live where there are not. They may long to get away to Florida for a while in the depth of winter, but not to live there all year round. We don’t necessarily like the extremes, even if we do like the four seasons. And what we love most of all are the transitions.

Some climatologists and meteorologists don’t recognize spring and autumn, speaking only of winter and summer, with the other seasons being just transitions between them. And as I’ve noted before in this blog, when you ask people to name a favorite season, spring and autumn are the most popular, with autumn edging out spring in the contest, and summer and winter running far behind. When pressed for further definition most people will tell you something about the wonderful feeling of the first cool days after a long summer, or the first warm days after the cold of winter. It is the change we like, the transition from one thing to another.

We are restless beings. How else did small bands of early hunter-gatherers come to populate the entire globe? We are hungry for change. Summer may be nice, with its pools and barbecues, outdoor concerts and Shakespeare in the Park, pretty girls in sandals and sundresses, but after a while the heat is too much, we’re weary of living in air conditioning, we’ve harvested all the tomatoes and peppers we can eat, stew, can or foist on neighbors, and it’s time for a change.

Human societies worldwide have cherished the autumn for a long, long time. Of course there is its aspect as representing an end of life. In the old symbolic systems in Chinese painting, autumn scenes, especially birds flying away over bare trees, evoke death.

Maybe it’s our desire to fight this that there are more celebrations, traditions, and events in autumn than any other season. While the two major winter events, Christmas and New Year’s Eve, may eclipse any autumn festival for size or glamour, they pale against the sheer number of autumn’s special days. The beginning of school, of sports seasons, hunting seasons, theater seasons, symphony seasons, homecoming games, harvest festivals, Halloween, Thanksgiving, the list goes on and on, to the point that it’s surprising how much we get up to in the autumn—all against a backdrop of glorious, multicolored trees.

So bring on the autumn. Let’s dust off the football, carve the pumpkin, dig out Mom’s old recipe for cranberry relish, get our sweaters and coats dry-cleaned, plan our annual autumn color tour, check our seasons tickets for this, that, and the other. There may not be any ancient rituals aimed at bringing on the autumn, but in modern times, few seasons surpass it for traditional observances.

After All, There Are Only Four Seasons . . .

30 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by in Autumn, Fall, Seasons

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This morning before dawn I was outside. Venus was on the eastern horizon, but above that the sky was clouded over and I saw no other stars. It rained last night and the night before, and finally some of the late summer heat and humidity have been washed out of the atmosphere. A thrill of anticipation ran through me.

In the past few years I have done a number of informal polls about the seasons. In one I simply asked people to name the four seasons. It’s funny (to me at least) how often people do not name them in order. I care little for which season you begin with, but it does seem like they should be named in order. Another is asking people what to call the season between summer and winter: most Americans say fall, but I very much prefer autumn.

But the one thing I like to ask people about the most is their favorite season. All four seasons have their fans, but spring and autumn have the most–and autumn is hands-down the favorite season. I get it, it’s probably my favorite too, ergo the aforementioned thrill of anticipation.

There is a certain feeling we get when autumn comes on. It’s a nostalgia, almost a deja vu, full of ill-defined longing and bittersweet reminiscence. Autumn takes us to the place where we can sense the cyclical nature of life on earth more strongly than any other season, when we can feel life drawing in to its essence. But here’s the funny thing: this feeling, as far as I can tell, is universal among human beings. We all feel it, we all share it. And yet I have had so many people try to articulate the autumn feeling to me, as if I would not understand, as if I did not feel it too. The sense that the autumn feeling is particular to an individual is almost as universal as the feeling itself.

The seasons surround us as thoroughly as the ground and sky and wind and trees. They are a part of every life. We believe, fervently in some cases, that our responses to them are personal, unique, and idiosyncratic. But it would be next to impossible to have a reaction to any season that is in any way unique. After all, there are billions of us, and only four seasons.

I don’t know if it adds to or detracts from my appreciation of autumn’s sentimental rush to know that every person around me feels the same. I do like knowing that I am part of the human pageant and share much with my fellow creatures in time and space. But I also like to consider myself uniquely sensitive. I know I won’t have figured this out before autumn gives way to winter, nor spring to summer, and then we start again.

Living in the Seasons

13 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by in Autumn, Calendar, Dates, Fall, Gregorian Calendar, Nature, Seasons, Winter

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I had time yesterday morning to take a walk in the woods surrounding my house. My woods, as it were, since it’s all property we own. I trudged out in a direction I hadn’t been before, walking down a steep rocky slope, which was further rendered hazardous by the slippery carpet of fallen leaves. It was a beautiful autumn morning, partly cloudy, slight breeze, mild temperature, very calm and quiet out.

You walk for a while and then you sit on a rock and gaze out across a valley at the trees that are still glowing in their autumn colors, and then you turn your eyes to the ground right around you, where a dozen kinds of leaves make a tangled pattern of color and shape, and you wonder whether you should concentrate your gaze above or below. Where are the answers? Where are the better questions?

So it’s autumn (or fall, to most Americans). I mean, we’re in the midst of all the things that define autumn–trees in brilliant color, leaves falling everywhere, breezy cooling days of misty sunlight and cloudiness–though the temperature was predicted to drop last night and bring the first snow. Anyone who has read this blog more than a few times knows that I have a problem with the calendar, which was developed to number days in a defined year, but doesn’t do a good job of tracking much else. Each season starts weeks after all the things that define that season have been in place.

That’s why meteorologists have meteorological seasons, which start at the beginning of the months in which those seasons predominate, and people living their lives in the real world start calling it summer when it gets summery, winter when it gets wintery. When you do, there’s always some smarty-pants standing by to remind you that technically, it’s not autumn yet, not winter yet . . . not until such and such a date.

We have this system that insists that spring begins at the vernal equinox, or summer begins at the summer solstice. These traditions go way back to ancient times, when people celebrated solar phenomena as the agency of deities who controlled them, and thereby also controlled the seasons. But the only thing that happens at the summer solstice is the summer solstice: seasonal change is incremental, and always variable.

I stepped out this morning to find that the predawn sky was as clear as a new morning sky could be, and every constellation announced itself. It was cold, down in the twenties. So is it winter now? Of course not. By later this week we’ll have temperate autumn days again, and we’ll still be watching the leaves fall and going to see our kids play football at outdoor venues.

You look up to the canopy of trees overhead, and down to the underbrush at your feet, and you realize that the answers are all around. This is not your woods, even though you’re writing a monthly check to a mortgage company somewhere: this is nature, and it will go on doing what it does independent of your occasional treks out here to check up on it. Likewise the seasons will go on changing in response to a thousand factors, very few of which we can tally and none of which we can control.

What season is it? Wake up, look outside. You tell me. Just don’t expect your calendar to clue you in, even though the page for November carries the appropriate photograph. The days will not be pinned down, and the seasons will not be tacked to the wall. You can’t define them, you can only live them.

Dominion, Or Not

07 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by in Agriculture, Autumn, Fall, History, Mythology, Nature, Seasons, Weather

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Yesterday I was reading an article in Midwest Living magazine about all the things we love about Fall. The author noted wryly that every year about this time she hears the same thing: people lamenting that the trees are not as pretty this year as in past years. There was a late frost in spring, or drought conditions in summer and it affected the trees. And then suddenly, one day, we drive down the street and boom! There’s a brilliant display of autumn foliage, despite everything. Okay, we get it.

Life on our planet is divided into two kingdoms, the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom, and everything living, with minimal exceptions such as fungi and bacteria, belong to one or the other. I have a friend who is a botanist and she has more than once emphasized to me the preeminence of the plant kingdom on earth. Compared to plants, the animals are johnny-come-latelies, after-thoughts. Popular mythologies like to speak of the cycles of life, the circles of being, but that is an oversimplification, and really only jollies us along in our inalienable membership in the junior kingdom.

The fact is that all of the animals could die off and plants would endure; but if plants go away, so do the animals. Sure, if there were no bees many plants would move towards extinction, but we tend to overemphasize the importance of those particular plants, since many of them are the ones we eat. And birds and grass eating mammals are responsible for spreading the seeds of various plants, but they have at best a minimal affect; some species might wane without their animal enablers, but in general, the world would continue greening and browning in tune with the seasons.

Our popular mythologies also like to talk about Man’s Dominion over the Animals. Much has been made of this in history by way of justifying hunting, meat-eating, mass slaughter of food animals and more. But the interesting thing is that, while dominion over the animals has been easy, what we have fought tooth and nail for is dominion over the plant kingdom.

What is a garden but a place where we exercise dominion over a small plot of land? And a field planted with a food crop is a larger version of that, an area where we not only sow and hope to raise a chosen plant, but in which we hope to prevent the incursion of all other plant life. It is a business fraught with headaches and setbacks, and such is the history of mankind ever since what anthropologists call the Neolithic Revolution began some 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. Our homesteads, our villages, finally even our cities are places where we have worked, with different degrees of success, to push back the relentless onslaught of the plant kingdom. Weeds are the advance troops of the conqueror, fighting back against us on every front.

And, if you think about it, the seasons are an expression of the natural cycles of the plant kingdom. It is plants that brown and die back when the days begin to cool, awaiting the sun of springtime. Demeter, she who ruled the seasons, was goddess of grain, not herds. Most seasonal deities in history have been vegetation gods. Sure, there are some seemingly instinctual, seasonal animal behaviors, such as hibernation, but these are purely learned responses to what the plant kingdom is doing: there’s nothing to eat, so we might as well sleep.

I have always thought that everything on earth exists around us and we are just along for the ride. Looked at in this light, it seems even more so. Our pride and our chest thumping over dominion of the animal kingdom is small potatoes in the end, and we are still just following along while the plant kingdom dominates everything around us. And the annual autumn display? Those glorious, defiant bursts of gold and red and copper on every hillside? They’re just a showy reminder of who’s in charge. Yeah, we get it. You don’t have to brag about it.

The End of Summer

28 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by in Agriculture, Autumn, Farming, Nature, Seasons

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There’s this funny thing that happens to me once in a while. I’ll be out somewhere, at a store, a movie, at work, and someone will pass and for a moment I think it looks like someone I know. ‘Oh, there’s Joe!’ I’ll think to myself, or ‘There’s Donna!’ But then I realize it’s not Joe or Donna, but someone who simply looked like or called to mind those people. And then, here’s the odd part, sometime within the next few hours I will see Joe or Donna. It’s just strange, like the occurrence of deja vu.

I experienced the seasonal equivalent of this phenomenon the other day. I was walking up the driveway and I saw, in a gust of breeze, a cluster of yellow leaves flying away. It struck me that I was seeing the first notice of the end of summer, the onset of autumn. But once my eyes focused on the sight I realized it was not leaves, but a group of yellow butterflies coursing over and beyond the barn, really quite lovely, but not the harbinger of autumn. And then, an hour later, while driving down a side street toward work, I saw yellow leaves being blown across the road–actual leaves this time, cast down from a tree and scattering in front of me.

There is a heat advisory this week, with heat indices above 100 degrees. It certainly does not feel like summer is drawing to a close, except in the very cool mornings, before the sun has climbed above the horizon and begun its fierce work. In the American Midwest we usually have summerlike temperatures deep into September, so I don’t nurse any illusions about sudden breaks in the heat pattern. But the cicadas are filling the dusk with their vigorous song these days, and I know that time marches on.

I know I’m kind of new at this, but I am ready to offer one opinion about ‘country life.’ Summer is the season least accommodating to the experience of nature. Why? Too much to do. During the autumn and winter, despite household and barn chores, I found myself on many weekend afternoons dressing warmly and walking through the woods, down paths, across fields, finding out what this land holds. In summer, I spend that time on the lawn tractor, trying to keep ahead of Mother Nature, whose goal it always is to reclaim my patch of land for her own empire. It is a weekly, a daily fight. Then there’s the garden, the blackberry patch, the fruit trees and more that need attention.

Of course, to many people, tending a garden and fruit trees is experiencing nature, but I have never thought so. To me, horticulture and agriculture are applied technologies. Yes, you are on the land and getting your hands into the dirt, but gardening is a matter of controlling nature, not experiencing it. And while spring is about planting and autumn is about harvest, summer is the season most intensely involved with agriculture, not nature.

I will miss summer as it goes by, but I am also ready for the cool days and colors of autumn. Next summer I will do better. I will control the grass better, and grow more fruit, and plant more things in a larger garden. This summer was kind of an experiment. I have all autumn and winter to look back on it, to make plans, and to have a great summer next year.

In Which the Seasons Literally Change

23 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by in 4th of July, Autumn, Calendar, Change, climate, Fall, Mythology, Nature, Religion, Science, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Weather, Winter

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My life in the country, for the first several months, was beset by a troubling literalness. Like I was living the pages of a Country Life calendar showing what to expect month by month. We saw a significant thaw towards the end of February. In early spring robins made their appearance with an almost pedantic regularity, and by late spring, does with fawns crept tenuously across the fields. Asparagus jumped up in April, and strawberries too. We ate radishes planted earlier than other crops, and harvested tender lettuce by the middle of May. Throughout the month of May we saw clouds of Mayflies, and I saw my first June bug–literally saw my first June bug–on June first. It’s like these creatures were being paraded out by a stage manager in response to the verses of a song. I almost expected fireworks to spontaneously generate on July 4th.

Then something funny happened. Summer came on, pretty much on cue. But it failed, and continued to fail, in heating up the way summer does. It rained and rained. As a matter of fact, we have only had the hoses out to water our lawn or garden once or twice this year, and everything is as green and ripe as can be. Now we are setting record low temperatures for late July. We have not turned on the air conditioning this week. This morning I am sitting on the porch while a slow drizzle wets the screens, and as the sun comes up, everything in the distance is a blur in thick fog.

People’s reactions to all of this are interesting. Those who claim to doubt the reality of climate change scoff and say, ‘so much for global warming!’–but of course we have seen many record high temperatures broken in the past ten years. This is the first time we have set record lows for a long time. Many people like the lower summer temperatures, but they regard it all warily: ‘We’re gonna pay for this, just wait and see.’

But having spent the past several months researching the myths and the deities who over time have been thought to control the seasons, my thoughts turn to other peoples in other times. What would people three thousand years ago, who counted on a long hot summer to provide bountiful harvests and good hunts to fill larders for the winter months, have thought of all this? What happens if Persephone leaves her mother and returns to assume her throne in the Underworld months too early? Why did it happen? Did we omit some crucial obeisance to Demeter? Did our ceremonies to resurrect Adonis not work?

To me, this is poetic speculation. I know that Canadian cool fronts have been making their way across the American Midwest in response to erratic shifts in the jet stream, and that this pattern will only hold for a while; that summer will return with all its fierce heat and humidity–that we will indeed pay for this. Writers and poets in modern times often evoke myths like Demeter and Persephone or Aphrodite and Adonis, but they are metaphors in their hands, images to enhance poetic vision. There was nothing metaphorical to the ancient people who believed these myths: the winter was quite literally caused by Persephone’s return to the Underworld, and spring by her return to her mother’s embrace. If the spring did not arrive on time, or if signs of an early end to summer were apparent, it was cause for worry. Not knowing the natural causes of meteorological changes, people worked out their own rites and rituals aimed at effecting the desired changes. One can only suppose they approached these rituals with all the fervency of true believers.

Someone (exactly who is still in question) once said that ‘everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.’ This is an ironical acknowledgement of what we knew by the late 19th century, that the weather is ruled by natural forces, that there is nothing you nor I nor any mythical agent can do to change it. The seasons change, they are not changed. We get what we get, even though we expect certain things at certain times, like the pages of a calendar: look it’s April, here are the showers! Look it’s May, here are the flowers!

Getting Used to It

20 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by in Autumn, Death, Fall, Nature, Seasons, Spring, Stoicism, Summer, Winter

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Yesterday Leah found a dead fawn on our driveway, at nearly the farthest point from the house. She was riding, and came down to the house to get me. I walked along beside her and we discussed the likelihood that someone coming to or leaving the house had struck the fawn with their car. The creature was tiny, scarcely larger than a small dog. There were no signs that it had been struck. Its fur, the lovely white-spotted fur of the newborn, was still slick in several places, as if its mother had not completed licking away the birth fluids. It only took a moment of looking around at the tall grass lining the drive to spot a large area where the grass was crushed and matted, indicating that the doe had struggled here to deliver her fawn. But what happened then is anybody’s guess.

The only sign of trauma on the dead animal was a bloodied muzzle, but that appeared to be more the work of an opportunistic scavenger than a predator. Black flies already swarmed the corpse. My instinct was to ascribe the death to natural causes.

‘It’s our property,’ Leah insisted, ‘we have to do something with it.’ We, meaning, of course, me. I picked it up by the hooves, so petite that all four fit in the grip of one hand. Its weight was minimal, but its head swung loosely as I walked, the flies swirling off in angry clouds around my legs. I walked into the deep grass, about fifty paces off the drive, and tossed the corpse under a juniper tree. Likely it will be food for some of the same predators who had already been at it.

This is, I’m guessing, the sort of thing I’m expected to get used to, living in the country. But I don’t know. I’m pretty old now, perhaps too old to become inured to the casual death of such a beautiful animal. Even this morning I still feel the small hooves in my hand, the sloshing dead weight swaying as I walked. I think its wrong to be indifferent about that.

We had some snowy days this past winter, after a few winters of very little snow. Figures, since deep snow was exactly what I dreaded most. I hadn’t made any provision for plowing snow; I don’t like to purchase expensive equipment before I’m sure it will be needed. We awoke one morning to find it impossible to get out of our drive and onto the road. The only results of shoveling like mad for a few hours were a sore back and a few insignificant, narrow paths in the snow. I think I’ll be needing that snow plow.

Here in late spring I find all of the areas of our property that are not still wooded covered in waist high grass. I have mowed out a large ‘lawn,’ but the rest is undisturbed. Having come so recently from the suburbs, I can’t escape the feeling that this is an encroachment, something I should, but will never be able to, control. I need to get used to the idea that in some places on earth, grass grows without the intervention of power mowers and weed eaters.

I’m sure I’ll have similar qualms in autumn, when the leaves in their stupendous abundance begin to fall. I’ll rake and blow them off of the sidewalks and the patio, back to some acceptable perimeter that defines our yard, and then spend hours glaring out windows at the piles, silently challenging them, inwardly troubling myself for not doing something about the leaves.

Each season out here presents something I’ll need to get used to, whether it’s the snow of winter, leaves of autumn, or summer’s stunning armadas of flying insects. All of these things I believe I can come to assimilate into my lifestyle, to put up with, or ignore, or deal with on some level, whether it’s with better equipment or a more stoic outlook.

But the cycles of life and death–especially when they materialize in the untimely death of a newborn animal–are something that will always mystify and sadden me, and that’s as it should be. This is what makes us human no matter where we are, whether we are in the most sterile suburb scrubbed of anything natural except Bradford Pear trees and banks of mulched geraniums, or deep in the wild, surrounded by uncontrollable vegetation. I know I should have buried the fawn. I just didn’t feel up to it, and now it’s too late.