Relative Something

In my mind, there is nothing quite like the change of seasons in places like Minnesota that enjoy the full variety of 4 seasons of the year to full extremes. If you stop and think about it, the seasons are in constant change, but it doesn’t seem that way, as we perceive it. To us, it appears to be summer for a while, then it changes into fall, then winter, followed by spring. Bing, bang, boom.

One of the amazing things about the seasons here is how far opposite summer and winter are. When standing in the midst of the most oppressively hot and humid summer day, it is incredibly hard to reconcile that just six short months ago it was a barren deep-freeze outside. I’m always impressed by how short our memories get for that difference. In summer, we hardly think that winter happens in this very same place.

It seems to me, the calendar dates of each season fall in the middle of that particular season, but the designation is, that it starts that day. By June 21st, it feels like it has been summer for weeks. Same for the other 3 seasons. Why not mark the equinox as the middle, not the beginning of one and end of another?

Today, it is feeling very fall-like. I noticed last week, as I left for morning soccer, it has been dark outside, and not long ago I needed my sunglasses on the drive. The hints of change sneak in little by little. Now that I think of it, one day last week I noticed the tree outside the building at work had dropped a whole bunch of leaves for some reason and I found myself mentioning as I walked in that it looked like fall out there.

By far, the one change of seasons that is most noticeable is fall. It’s got to be the leaves changing color. There’s always the onset of the football season and the start of a school year that scream of fall, but those have less to do with the weather and more to do with association, due to the coincidence of timing. It is the changing leaves that win fall all the attention.

Fall isn’t far off now. It feels like it is already upon us. The seasons are, indeed, in constant change.