Seasons Change

I love the Bangles. Rewind to me at 14, and you’ll find me and three of my best friends at Magic Mountain in Southern California, in one of those Make Your Own Music Video studios, belting out Eternal Flame in an exuberant cacophany of swelling adolescent emotion. Don’t laugh at our big hair.

Anyway. I’ve noticed that we – or maybe I should say I – tend to think of Fall and Spring as seasons that lead to other seasons. That is, autumn is getting ready for – leading up to – Winter. Spring is the opening act for Summer. But why?

My theory is that Fall and Spring are more overtly active seasons – they seems restless, windy, full of change. Trees change daily, from nothing to bright somethings, or later, from ubiquitous greens to crazed shades of tie-dye. And in Winter and Summer, changes are much slower, if evident at all. In Winter, it’s cold and dead. In Summer, everything’s limply hot and slow.

Of course, the world never stops changing.

I am trying to change the story in my head about the seasons. I am trying to think of Fall as a permanent condition. Loss, loss, loss. It’s constant. It doesn’t lead to anything else, any resolve, any final kingdom. Or taking the whole cycle into consideration, it always leads back to itself.

How you see it depends on how you tell the story, I guess. Which season do you see as the first one? Which one is the last?