Seasons …
I live in a city. Arguably the second most beautiful city in the world. Your choice might be Paris or Vienna or Amsterdam. My choice for most beautiful would be Prague. But I haven’t seen every world-class city yet.
Cities are bubbles. They are insular and discrete from the natural world we evolved in. Especially this one. Here each day is the same temperature year round. Here there are no seasons. Leaves and snow don’t fall. There is no time of year where rain comes with any regularity.
I miss seasons. I miss the slow breath of change that marks the passing of years. Miss the anticipation and disappointment of spring. The disappointment mostly as a child, because spring never yielded to summer fast enough.
I do miss the languid days of summer. The laying in the grass, while creating images of everything in the shapes of clouds. And too, the frantic days of summer preparing for this or that activity. Summer always seemed to pass too soon.
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I miss the fall. Those days of diminishing light where the color of nature changes and there’s a nip in the air that portends the stronger bite that winter brings. Before our “modern” society, fall always brought the end of familiar foods and the offering of new flavors that reminded one of the holidays to come. I always fell in love in the fall.
Winter always has its hardships, but there is fun there as well. Most of the winter fun was for the youth, or the youthful at least. No air ever smelled as clean as after a winter storm. There was seldom a more rewarding feeling than getting warm again while drinking something warm and sweet. The desolation of nature during winter was always thought provoking. Even when the days seemed gloomy, there was always the knowledge that recovery and rebirth would happen again soon.
White to grey to green to reds and browns and to white again. The circular palette of the seasons … I miss. I see building and pavement and tangles of wire, if those things can be called colors. And I see them every day of the year, in even a beautiful city. I miss the slow breathing of nature that the city filters out.
