Tag Archives: Weather

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.

Jupiter Shmupiter

15 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by in Ice Storm Jupiter, Ice Storms, Seasons, Weather, Weather Forecasting

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I just finished a morning run, and as I entered the door to my apartment building a haggard-looking woman with a coat thrown over her pajamas stopped me in the hallway. She was eyeing the outdoors with fear in her eyes. ‘Is it icy out there?’ she asked. ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s not.’ ‘Not at all?’ she continued, suspiciously. ‘I just ran two miles,’ I said, ‘and I didn’t see any ice anywhere.’ I should have added that while there is a little drizzly rain, the temperature is above freezing. As I was walking towards the apartment building I heard birdsong, and I thought of spring. So no, there is no ice. ‘Well,’ the woman said, turning back towards her apartment, ‘I’m not crazy.’

I’m not sure what she meant by that. Maybe she’s one of those people who is often suspected of being crazy, and she wanted to let me know otherwise. She might have meant that she is not crazy enough to venture out on what’s supposed to be an icy morning, regardless of my assertions. But most likely she meant that she hadn’t made up the idea of ice: that there was truly, really, actually supposed to be ice out there. So where was it?

They called it Jupiter, an ice storm of such massive proportions that everyone was cautioned to stay off the roads and prepare to spend three or four days indoors. Stock up on food and buy extra  batteries for flashlights, since there would be widespread power outages. Schools, churches, libraries, businesses all closed—long before a single raindrop fell.

At the height of the hysteria, Missouri’s new governor came on TV and told everyone that he would be mobilizing the National Guard in response to this emergency. That’s really the point when I yielded to the hysteria and closed the library where I work. My staff had been walking around in blackening dread, and I’m sure there was a whispering campaign conducted around the theme of how insane I was to even consider opening on the day of the climatic holocaust. I should have been smarter. I know that new governor is a GOP’er whose main credential to be our state executive is his experience as a Navy Seal, whose campaign ads featured him shooting firearms into various exploding objects (for readers not from Missouri, I swear I’m not making this up), and who clearly had a puerile, macho need to be seen hanging tough with the soldiery.

So Friday came. I was home, and called my mother, spoke with my brother, all of us checking on each other to be sure we were safe and making sound decisions in this time of impending doom. And then I sat all morning and afternoon watching while light occasional showers put down the tiniest film of ice on tree branches and car windows, but completely failed to glaze the streets or sidewalks. It was a complete bust, as far as I (or anyone who would take the time to step outside) could tell.

But the funny thing is that it didn’t change the frantic nature of the reporting on The Event. TV news reporters swarmed the region, letting us know where the worst icing was, where the roads were the most hazardous, where the emergency centers were. It was kind of sad watching a reporter who stood before a building in downtown St. Louis as he asked the cameraman to follow him to a little patch of ice he had discovered near a curb—he prodded it with his shoe and intoned ominously about its dangers. Late in the day came the news of the first death linked to the storm, someone out in one of our rural counties, though nobody mentioned the nature of the death or how it was ‘linked to the storm’—you could just tell the news teams were so overjoyed at being able to report a death that such details became immaterial. By evening I had given up on expecting the storm to make its mark today. Maybe on Saturday we would incur The Wrath of Jupiter.

But as Saturday dawned I came back to reality. The temperature was just above freezing, precipitation was minimal. I quipped that if they wanted to name this storm for a planet, it should be Pluto, the planet that turned out to be too small to deserve the name. I recollected once again that weather forecasts are, first and foremost, advertisements for television news. And for grocery stores. Wow, did our local stores sell out of stuff over the past few days! Even the National Weather Service did not seem to have a grip on things. One guy I work with mentioned on Thursday that after so many warm days in January the streets and sidewalks were likely too warm to ice over quickly. I had the same thought, especially since the temperatures were not exceptionally cold, hovering just around the freezing mark. If a couple of librarians could see that obvious point, couldn’t entire staffs of trained meteorologists figure that out?

The point I want to make is, get out there and see what’s happening. There is still, even in this time of computer modeling and Doppler radar and whatever other technological weather tracking, simply no substitute for going outside and seeing what it feels like it might do. If you hover indoors, staring at your local TV news coverage, you’ll never know anything that’s happening, only what they want to tell you. I know, it’s a sad irony but true, that watching the news will teach you almost nothing of importance. As Nobel Laureate Robert Zimmerman put it many years ago, ‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.’

Thinking back on it, I wish I had taken that woman in the hallway by the hand and led her outdoors. ‘Please,’ I would say, ‘just step out here and see. Birds are singing, there is a light breeze and a bit of mist in the air—and no ice.’ But I didn’t. I only watched her turn back to her apartment, likely to spend another day in her pajamas before the TV, shivering and worrying about whether her supply of Beef-a-Roni and canned tuna would hold out, muttering to herself or whoever she thinks might be listening that she is not crazy. No she is not. She is perfectly sane, in the exact same way all of us our perfectly sane.

Music

20 Saturday Aug 2016

Posted by in Music, Seasons, Weather

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Last Sunday was rainy around here. So rainy in fact that before the downpour was done there was significant flooding in the area. I had some places to go in the morning and spent a while in the car, headlights on, wipers wiping, and music on the radio.

I was unhappy with the selections on the classic rock station that morning, so I switched to classical. They were playing Baroque music, which is pleasing sometimes, but not that morning. I switched to the jazz station and found a tune by a combo featuring sax and trumpet, my favorite kind of jazz, and settled into it. The music filled the confined air of the car, the rain continued unabated, and I ate up the miles towards my destination.

Often in human life, especially human life in the seasonal climes, we find ourselves locked inside because of the weather. Snowy days, rainy days, even too hot days. In these times, for many of us, music is our companion. We always listen to music. I sometimes wonder if its very ubiquity on radio, computer, and various digital devices doesn’t devalue its ancient wonder.

For most of time, if you wanted to hear music, you had to make music, or know someone who would make it for you. Sometimes it was just singing, or singing to the accompaniment of drums, pipes, or the simplest of string instruments. Everyone has heard about the origin of folk music and blues music in the work songs of field hands and slaves. For a long time, any family that could afford it had a piano in the house, and someone who could play it at least competently. The sale of sheet music used to be big business.

Much changed with the coming of recorded music. The number of people who could make music declined while the number who could listen to music increased. The quality of the music listened to also declined rapidly. (We’ll argue about this some other time.) But the important point is, now almost anybody can take music inside with them when the weather dictates a retreat from the elements.

Music is solace on a rainy day. It is comfort amid a snowy afternoon. The weather changes what we listen to. There is time and space to listen. In the raucous comings and goings of a summer afternoon I enjoy pop songs and rock ballads. When I know I am confined for a while I am more interested in putting on a long Mahler symphony, Beethoven concerto, or Bach chorale. I have the mental space to listen.

When I reached my first destination last Sunday morning, the Ethical Society’s Sunday morning platform, there were two musicians to entertain us, a folk guitarist and a brilliant young fiddle player. They led off with a rousing traditional reel. It was an unexpected delight in the otherwise somber air of the rainy morning chamber, and it seems everyone sat up a little straighter after the bright chords died away. I know I did.

I have read a few times the theory that in the ancient years of human prehistory, the time of hunter-gatherers, we would gather in caves or other enclosures during the coldest winter months, huddling together, doing little, conserving energy in a kind of semi-hibernation. I wonder how we stood it. We’re human beings, after all, not given, like bears or skunks, to sleeping long stretches or staring at cave walls for weeks on end. I like to imagine someone in the family band would at one point or another burst into song, or what would turn out to be the prototype of song, our earliest music, filling the dank echoing darkness with sound, expressing frustration, or expectation, or even joy at the thought of the eventual advent of spring and sunny weather. I know I would.

 

 

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!

Lessons of the Seasons

31 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by in Autumn, College, Education, Fall, History, Horses, Ice Age, Nature, Seasons, Spring, St. Louis, Summer, Weather, Winter

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My daughter hates living in the St. Louis area. It’s about the weather. Last week and up to two days ago, we had temperatures in the low seventies, even light jackets were barely required for comfort; today we will be lucky to see 32 degrees, there is a sharp wind and a threat of snow. It has been seesawing like this all winter long.

What my daughter says, echoing what you hear a lot of people say, is that she’d rather it just stay cold: at least that way you get used to it, you accept that you put on coat, hat and gloves before venturing out. It is winter, after all. Of course I believe most people are happy for the few days of warmth in the midst of the season. You get to turn off the heat for a day, wash the car, do a few outdoor chores without freezing your buns off. It’s just a drag when the cold returns so soon, and so completely.

My daughter’s problem is that she works outside, tending to the horses at a boarding stable. It’s always been a strange phenomenon to me, but I’ve spent hundreds of hours around stables and it seems that no matter how cold it is outside, it’s five degrees colder in the stable. It is her choice to be doing this work, and her choice to be doing it full time rather than attending college. She decided at the beginning of the fall semester that college was not part of the plan for her future, which includes riding in competitions on the A circuit (whatever that is), and owning her own top-ranked stable. How she will afford the investment in a top-ranked stable is a question she has perhaps not fully dealt with.

My wife was–and is still–distraught at our daughter’s plans, at her refusal to enter college. She was a straight A, honor roll, accelerated class student who finished high school in three years. A bright academic future clearly awaited her. But a man I know, an academic adviser of considerable experience, once told me that there is nothing more difficult than keeping a really bright student in school. I see this now, and I am willing to work within the parameters of reality, no matter how much it interferes with our plans.

There are many lessons to be learned that do not originate in the classroom. Working in a horse stable, shoveling manure and hauling hay bales and coaxing aged farm equipment to fire up on frigid mornings, will surely teach one in short order whether or not this is the best kind of life; or whether something more in keeping with your academic potential might clear a better path to the future. I understand the role of the seasons in this lesson.

Back in the glorious autumn, with moderate to cool temperatures and the beauty of fall trees all about, my daughter came home each evening full of spirit, jabbering endlessly about which horse owner did this, and which rider did that, and all the things she was learning from various seasoned horse people. Now, as winter grinds into its weary depths, she only complains. She is being taken advantage of by the stable managers, who are supposed to pitch in with the work, but increasingly let her do more and more of it. The horse owners are stupid and negligent. Nobody knows what they’re doing.

A long time ago, I tended a large vegetable garden with a good friend of mine and his father. One July afternoon, with temperatures hovering in the nineties and humidity near 100%, my friend’s father paused over a row he was weeding, and remarked that ‘the hoe doesn’t fit your hand in July like it does in April.’ Indeed. An activity that seems so gladsome and salubrious in the spring is only tiring in late summer. And an activity that seems to be teaching you all about equestrianism and stable management in autumn turns out to be only a rip-off in the cold, cold weeks of winter.

My daughter has begun to talk about signing up for classes, perhaps as early as this summer, just to get some general education requirements out of the way while she decides what she really wants to do. It may be horticulture. It may be architecture. I don’t care. I just want her to be happy. But I also know that this plan needs to be well along before the weather begins to break.  I have been around stables in the spring, when the hay is all fragrant, and the sunlight filters through the stalls, and the horses stamp and chuff, eager to be at pasture. It’s the sort of place and time that makes anyone think about quitting a desk job and going to work on the farm.

In anthropology and history, there is a debate about environmental determinism. This is the idea that humans living in more adverse environments, such as Ice Age Europe, advanced more quickly because climatic pressures necessitated the creation of technologies and methods for survival, like building warm shelters, sewing clothes, and drying and smoking meat to store against winter’s scarcity. This idea was long considered Eurocentric, if not downright racist, supporting an old fashioned view of history as largely the accomplishment of Western Civilization. But it has begun to reemerge, as researchers revisit the common sense of its basic tenets, and as it comes to be applied to areas aside from Ice Age Europe, such as China and the Andes Mountains.

I think you can call it what you like, I believe that climate and the seasons have always taught humans many lessons. Whether it’s culture writ large, or the things that one young woman needs to understand about life in general, they are still teaching us every day.

Death out of Season

25 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by in Autumn, climate, Death, Drought, Fall, Heat Wave, Meteorology, Seasons, Spring, Summer, War, Weather

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Don is this old retired guy who lives across the street from me. We’re friendly in the reserved, non-verbal way of men, but I don’t know him well. Judging from what I can tell by his activities, tending his lawn is his major passion. In green times he cuts his lawn more than once a week. He trims it with an electric weed whacker and fine tunes the job with a hand-held battery-powered unit. I have seen him sweep his yard with a broom, removing those last few blades of cut grass. The centerpiece of his front yard is a dwarf weeping cherry tree which bursts with white blossoms in spring and is a picture of green symmetry throughout the summer.

It’s hardly news that the American Midwest has been on fire this summer. Record high temperatures are being set one after another, in week after week of ceaseless heat and humidity. The heat is worsened by a persistent drought. People are watering their lawns until the fear of the water bill, or the guilt about the waste of water, or perhaps just the realization of the futility of it all finally overtakes them. What can it matter to keep a carpet of green grass growing when your world has become a desert?

On my drive to work, I see ghastly sights of things dying. Flowers at the entrances to parks, the shrubs lining someone’s driveway, trees in the lot at a grocery store, all brown and as dry as old bones. I think how autumnal it all looks, here in the middle of summer. And then I correct myself. It doesn’t look autumnal. Autumn has a beauty and a grace all its own. This is something else.

This heat is just killing plants and trees. It’s not leading them through their natural life cycles, not allowing them to live out their natural lives. As humans we are accustomed through long experience to these life cycles. We measure our own lives in cycles that mimic those of the natural world: the spring of our lives, the autumn of our lives. The thing we fear most is untimely death, which we refer to often as a death out of season.

My father died very young, just forty-two years old. At the funeral, my grandfather sat in the front pew and cried aloud that it should be him in that coffin, not his son. When he too died several weeks later, I didn’t feel like anything in the natural order had been set aright. Still, this is a common sentiment, and a poignant example of how we dislike when our lives do not synchronize with the seasons. Wartime is the most egregious time for our race, since it signifies an untimely end for so many young people. We glorify the sacrifice to cover the unnatural horror of it.

So no, things do not look autumnal around here. They look as dead as things beset by violent forces, like a wartime landscape. It’s a wonder people can keep their chins up, keep smiling, keep asking one another, ‘Can you believe this heat?’ and ‘Hot enough for ya?’ with a chuckle in their voice. It’s how we deal with it, the human communication that helps us handle almost anything life can throw at us.

Don’s weeping cherry tree is dead. His lawn is brown. I have not seen him out much lately: just once or twice, going for the mail then retreating back to the air-conditioned interior of his home. I wonder how he and his wife are taking this heat. I’d like to go over and say something to him, see how he feels. But I can’t imagine what I might say. The trees in my yard are still green, still hanging on.

A Horse in Winter

06 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by in Anthropomorphism, Evolution, Horses, Ice Age, Science, Seasons, Thoroughbreds, Weather

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One December day a few years ago, a blistering cold day just after Christmas, I took my daughter to the stable to clean her horse’s stall. I thought it a terrible time to be there, doing that. For whatever reason, the inside of an unheated barn always feels ten degrees colder than it is outside–even outside in a strong wind. But when we got to the stable we found that Rachel, who owns the stables, was there with a woman we had not met before. She was a new boarder, bringing in three horses, here on this day in December.

It drove home to me a fact that of course I knew, though the instance was instructive: having horses is a lifestyle, not a hobby. When you are taking care of large animals, you can’t choose to take a few days off here and there; you don’t put them away for a while. They are, if not part of your family, at least a part of your life. Horse people worry more about the horses than themselves. They brave all kinds of elements to make sure their horses aren’t having to brave the elements–wrapping them in blankets, holding long debates with themselves about whether the horse needs one or two blankets tonight, or maybe just his light flysheet. Seriously, many of these horses have more and more varied foul weather gear than I have.

And here’s the irony of the whole thing: horses like cold weather. Horses are one of the last of the large Ice Age mammals, a species that would have courted extinction long ago except that for the past several thousand years, humans have found them useful. Horses thrive on open, frozen, windswept plains. They are one of the only grazing animals that will dig through snow to find the sparse grass beneath and continue grazing–other animals will stand there dumbly wondering where the grass went until starvation overtakes them. Horses are uniquely and excellently adapted to cold weather.

What horses don’t like is hot weather: summer’s heat, which brings flies, the bane of any horse’s life, and of the people who choose to be around them. A horse ridden for an hour in summer needs to be walked about for a bit to cool down, then bathed in cool water before going back to a shady stall to rest.

Horses evolved to live on the breezy savannahs and the icy plains of Ice Age Eurasia. But humans found them useful, and took them into every environment where human habitations developed. They bred different kinds of horses for different environments–the hardy Fjord and Icelandic breeds for way up north, the Arabian and Andalusian breeds with large nostrils and capacious lungs for hot desert environments. It’s these latter breeds which, due to their ability to breathe so well, were the basic stock for the racing Thoroughbred. So a horse type which was bred for the Arabian Peninsula was brought to England and Kentucky, USA, where their thin legs and short coats are not well-suited to damp, cold weather.

Like horses, humans evolved largely on the plains and river valleys of Ice Age Eurasia. Horses have been our companions and stock animals for so long that we think of them as being like ourselves, and thus we do things like decking them out in blankets when the weather gets a little nippy. It’s very likely that if asked, a horse would prefer to feel the cold weather. But I have never known a horse that seemed to mind the blanket. As long as there’s a salt lick, a pail of water and a heap of straw, a horse is happy, no matter the season.

Crocuses in Winter

09 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by in Meteorology, Seasons, Weather, Winter

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On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve I was out in the yard taking down my Christmas lights. New Year’s Eve, mind you, and I noticed crocuses starting to poke their heads up in some of my flower beds. The TV weather personalities had been wearing out the term ‘unseasonably warm’ for several days, and I was out working in my shirtsleeves. Still I was surprised to see this harbinger of spring announcing itself in mid-winter. ‘Well, you’re not announcing anything,’ I thought, ‘except your own inability to tell time. I certainly hope you’ve got enough energy left come spring to do your job properly.’

I’ve actually experienced a few warm New Year’s Eves in the past several years, as well as some unbearably icy ones. Weather is so variable in the American Midwest, washed over as we are by everything from Alberta Clippers to Gulf low-pressure to the tail ends of El Niño winds. The weather and the seasons are not synonymous. As Anthony Smith put it in his book Seasons, it’s a complicated relationship because the seasons are both the astronomical phenomena that define them and the terrestrial consequences of them: the same word has to serve for both.

I recently read a commentary by a British journalist who said that the seasons vary so greatly that we only perceive them as having been seasonal in a kind of vague retrospect: that our standard year is actually the spring of 1984, the summer of 1980, autumn of 2000 and winter of 1997. The seasons give us whatever weather the prevailing climatic conditions indicate, and we recall them according to set perceptions. Thus you’re likely to hear someone complain about what a hard winter it’s been on the same day you hear that this has been the third warmest winter on record. And it doesn’t matter if it’s been warm enough for crocuses to bloom in January: for that person it was a hard winter. That person’s winter may have been hard for reasons other than the weather–family problems, excessive illness, money troubles–so winter in that context is a marker of time, not meteorological phenomena. Someone who falls in love in December is likely to recall a very nice winter, regardless of the weather.

‘I know we’re going to pay for it.’ That’s what everybody says when we get unusually warm weeks in winter, or cool weeks in summer. It’s a gift horse into whose mouth we can’t help but peer. Of course we’re going to have cold days soon (giving the TV weather personalities a chance to say ‘bitter cold’ repeatedly) and February ice storms. Of course those little crocuses are going to wilt and turn brown. I wonder if I’ll remember, this time next year, what nice days we had in late December and early January, or if those crocuses spent all that energy for nothing.

In Winter, 2011

02 Friday Dec 2011

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One day a long time ago, it occurred to me out of the blue that autumn is the only season that has two names. Spring, summer and winter all get along with one name; but Autumn requires two. I wondered why. I am a librarian by profession, so finding answers is what I do. I pursued an answer to this question. I have been pursuing that answer for most of my life.

The pursuit led me, a few years back, to begin working on a book about how humans, as a species, and within our multitudinous cultures throughout history, have experienced, and learned from, and been shaped by, the seasons.

Earth has changed immensely throughout geological time. From a ball of fire to a ball of ice and everywhere in between, the planet has seen more species of plants and animals come and go than can ever be accounted for. But the one constant is that there have always been seasons. Always.

This blog is a selection of essays, thoughts and gleanings from my ongoing research. The book, should it ever come to fruition, will also be called The Varied God. The title is a quote from James Thomson, most famous for his set of poems called The Seasons:

                                                      ‘. . . these

are but the varied God. The rolling year

is full of thee.’

James Thomson, A Hymn on the Seasons