Re Learning the Seasons

Finding my way in this new life has involved learning a lot of new things. Most difficult and most important has been re-learning the things I knew so well that I didn't realize I had ever learned them at all, such as weather and the seasons. Storms here are nothing like a thunderstorm in Indiana, and the wind is altogether different. In Indiana, I could feel a storm coming. A bruised sky, a drop in pressure, an upside down dance of the leaves of the Silver Maple in the front yard of my childhood home were all part of a familiar landscape. The storm would roll over the prairies and howl and gnash lightning teeth and then pass on: dramatic, powerful, sometimes devastatingly violent, but short-lived and, most of all, familiar. Here the wind may saw away at nerve edges for days and then disappear with no drama.

My husband can read mare's tail and tadpoles and mackerel sky here, but in Indiana I could look up into a milky night sky in early December and say, "That is a snow sky," and not be at all surprised the following morning to see the light dusting of snow scuttering along the pavement and hiding against the sun in the last few long patches of still-green grass. Without thinking about it, I could look at the sky and know that it would be gone by 10am.

Although each season could have its anomalies, Indiana has a spring, summer, winter and fall. Spring is mud and cold and grey with splashes of snow or balmy summer hours all mixed in like a woman trying to decide which dress to wear. It can mean flash floods or tornadoes, or both. It means also the first signs of colour after drabness as daffodils and snowdrops and little blue squill pierce the dark brown earth and the grass starts to green up again. I can--or at least I could--sense all those signs of change. I used to know that by the time the rain started, it was already too late to avoid the flash floods as the waters rose in the underpasses and low bridges. I knew the rhythms of waiting out the floods, riding out the storms, and anticipating the last snow storm.

Summer in Indiana is hot, usually slow to arrive and late to leave. The unbearable heat of the Dog Days of August erodes the welcome with which the first few hot days were greeted. Summer is swimming pools and green grass and vacation time and outdoor concerts and fireworks and farmer's markets and red ripe juicy tomatoes that dribble their juice down your chin when you bite into them, and corn on the cob, fresh from the field into the pot of boiling water. Until I experienced the white nights of the north's long summer days, I thought Indiana summer days were long.

Late summer into Fall was my favorite season. It was a breath of fresh air after the frenzied heat of summer, yet the days were still warm and long. I loved watching the colours of the leaves. One small scarlet maple in my back yard rewarded me with the first banners announcing the change in seasons. It was the only season in which I enjoyed the inevitable delays in traffic on the long commute into the office because I could take a moment each day to note the shift from green with yellow and red touches to scarlet blazing with yellow undertones fading into ochre and then the first hints of brown until brown, skeletal leaves fought with the wind to linger on the emptying branches.

I loved gardening in the fall, teasing a second or third crop of spinach or cool tolerant crops out of the warm summer earth before the cold of winter froze the ground hard. Cold frames and improvised shelter could often sustain lettuce into January. More than once I cleared a thick layer of snow off the top of a cold frame to let the winter sun warm the leaves within. That little bit of captive, cozzened greenery was my talisman to ensure the return of the light. Two slow-growing dwarf spruce trees in double insulated pots sat like guardians either side of the door into my home in Indiana adorned with tiny lights wound around them top to bottom. The lights and the fragrance of their evergreen leaves helped sustain me through the Indiana winter.

Each of the seasons and I had grown accustomed to each other; we had an understanding. Leaving Indiana meant coming to an understanding in a place where the first cold sea winds of winter browned the leaves of a little spruce tree huddled safely, so I thought, in the shelter of a wall and a cottage wall. The tree and I struggled on into the first spring, but neither one of us thrived. A cold frame, relying on the heat from a winter sun, was useful only to protect the last summer squash from an early frost. I ate it reluctantly as if saying goodbye to it meant saying goodbye to summer and light and sun.

With time I am learning to read the signs of the seasons here. The seasons are not as distinct even for those who can read the sky and the sea as the seasons in Indiana. Learning that was my first lesson. Once again, I find myself enjoying the particular pleasures of fall--or Back End as it is called here. I will always miss leaves and trees and their colour shifting artistry. When I go south I drink in the spectacle, but the most beautiful colours of the hills occur in fall. I have taken photos and made sketches of a particularly beautiful stretch of road between here and Thurso where a cluster of rich green evergreen trees snuggles up against brown-purple heathered hills. The hues shift slightly whether the sun is in full flow in a blue sky or wearing a grey mantle, but the richness of the colours remains. I have not yet captured it and perhaps never will, but I know that it is part of this season. And yesterday as we drove along a back road I thought the red rowan berries winked at me as if to confirm that we have come to an understanding.