Seasons

One of the minorly annoying things about relocating is that it takes you a while to become accustomed to seasonal change.

In Old Home, seasons were, well, like clockwork.  Rains started in November - if your garden wasn't in by 31 October, it probably wasn't going to happen.  Rains peter off in early March, maybe as far as early April.  By the end of May, Summer was well on its way.  And about the middle of September, the cast of the sunlight let all and sundry know that Fall had come.

Here in New Home, it's different.  Not just the types of seasons (we really only have two:  Hot and Humid and Cold) but when they arrive.  Summer starts maybe in May - but sometimes in April too.  Winter comes possibly in November, maybe even as late as December.  And there are a couple of weeks wedged in between the two that seem to quality as Spring and Fall.

But I am still unsure.  We've been in a cooler phase over the last two weeks and the sun has occasionally taken the cast of what I would associate with Fall.  But is it Fall?  Or is it just another cruel joke on me (and indirectly on my garden), condemning me to another two months of watering and indecisiveness about Fall or Winter vegetables?

The leaves don't necessarily turn, but that's not a huge impediment for me:  I come from a place where the evergreen grow right along with the deciduous, and it's a roll of the dice whether your neighborhood will be raking leaves or just watching them stand there, eventually drifting them back to the forest floor.  Other plants seem to come and go, but the grass that is around me on the lawn of my neighbors never truly goes dormant; it just seems to grow less slowly.  And the fact that we have more water here, that everything can be green throughout the whole year with cooperative weather, means that the monsoon cycle I am used to (brown in summer and fall, green in winter and spring) is partially if not wholly of no use to me.

But the weather - that's the one that throws me off.  The seasons are passing, but I don't always realize they've gone before they've moved on. I can sense them - especially those ephemeral ones of spring and fall - out of the corner of my eye, but am always left with the sense of "Did I miss it? Has it already gone?"

I'll survive, of course - the sun still rises, the rain still occasionally arrives, the heat definitely so.  But in the back of my heart I always find myself continuing to look for signs of a season that may have already gone - or is not yet here.