Summer Winter
The seasonal transformation at some of our favorite places can be as surprising as it is breathtaking.
I calibrate the seasons by the anger of the geese.
A few times a week, more often during the summer, I ride my bicycle down along the Charles from where I live east toward Watertown Square. In the spring, when the geese are nesting, I am honked, hissed, and heckled at by yearlings who, only the spring before, were little green balls of fluff whose parents found me just as objectionable a presence as they do now. I am on my umpteenth generation of geese, and my popularity among the Branta genus still approximates that of Dick Cheney at a Greenpeace picnic. By now, I suppose, I am the story that adult geese tell their goslings to keep the kids in line. ("Eat all your muck, or the hairy beast on the rattly thing will come and take you away!") Nevertheless, I know it's spring when the geese are mad at me.
Perhaps you have your own methods by which to track the passage of the seasons. It's not spring until there are day games at Fenway. It's not summer until someone opens a hydrant. It's not autumn until leaf peepers overmatch the bargain zombies in the outlet malls of Vermont. It's not winter until there's pond hockey and tobogganing and TV weatherdrones at DefCon5. Maybe you mark the morning when the shutters open on the ice cream stand, or the afternoon on the Cape when fat first crackles across a virgin grill that will be layers deep in fried-clam detritus by Labor Day, or the evening when sailboats officially replace skates as the means for getting across the pond. Maybe winter comes for you, officially, when all of these things happen in reverse.
The important thing about marking the passage of the seasons is that we have seasons of which we can mark the passage in the first place. New England transforms itself. It changes color. It even changes its shape. (A golf course in winter looks like something from another planet. In the summer, it just looks like something populated by people from another planet.) A May day in Mississippi looks pretty much like a February day in Mississipppi. A May day in Maine looks nothing like a February day in Maine. Half a hundred memories change for each of us, as well, in color and in depth and in all the new things they come to mean. 