Sunday Essay: On the Seasons

The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, June 6^th. It is the 47^th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.

Last week’s essay: On the Pink Blanket

The season changed last week. Memorial Day passed, and the college students went home, and the families went on vacation. Traffic’s lighter here now. It’ll be lighter until August. We walked through Dirty Sixth last night and even it was light—hesitant from the rain and the pandemic, sure, but also just a little sparse, because Austin right now is a little sparse.

When I moved here, I had trouble knowing what season it was. I moved in January, and in February it was ninety degrees one Friday, and it felt like one long Spring Break until about April, at which point I was lost for a good while in my perception of the calendar. It took until the temperature finally arced back down around the end of September that year for me to feel any sort of a season, and even that touchpoint was soon lost when winter was unlike any winter I’d known.

Growing up, each season had two seasons within it. Summer had early summer—busy and stormy and humid—and it had late summer, hot and dry and relaxed. Fall had early fall—busy and glorious and soft—and it had late fall, crisp and vigorous and expectant. Winter had early winter—fluffy and celebratory and magical—and it had late winter, slushy and gray and exhausting. Spring had early spring—warm and promising and joyful—and it had late spring, cold and blustery and torturous. The seasons didn’t always go sequentially—spring especially has me questioning whether I correctly chose which was early and which was late—but each had two seasons within, and when people speak here of the changing seasons when describing what they miss about wherever from which they moved, these are the seasons they’re referring to. The seasons here, though, are different.

In Austin, winter is not magical. There can be a few magical moments, but it’s more just…quiet. Calm. Cool, not cold. Gray, but a light gray. Occasionally frosty, but rarely frosty. And so very brief. Spring breaks out in February, and it escalates from there into an exuberant March before turning to an alternatively stormy and breathtaking transitional period that lasts through April, May, and much of June, though in June it’s quiet once again as those who summer elsewhere leave to summer elsewhere. July brings real summer—hot, hot, hot—and in August, the town repopulates, but summer continues, sometimes through September. In October, fall comes, but it’s a 70-degree fall, just like the 70-degree spring that starts at a point in February. Sometime around Christmas, it’s winter again. Or so is my impression. I’ve done two and a half cycles here. I did 24 and a quarter cycles elsewhere.

It strikes me how much of the change here has to do with the population, and I realize that in the rest of my life the calendar of the people lined up with the calendar of the place, and that here that isn’t the case, that they’re staggered and this is vaguely strange. But whatever the marker, the seasons do change, and they did it last week, and the year again moves on.

Next week’s essay: On the Dead