On Changing Seasons (from the New England trip, September 2010)

Growing up in Ukraine, I loved the seasons: the joy of the first snow; the hassle of getting around when it’s frigid cold, icy, or wet; the anticipation of spring and warmth; the smell of flowers and freshly cut grass at the turn of summer; weeks on a beech by the see; sadness of summer’s end; the marvel and vividness of the foliage; the melancholy of an autumn rain. The weather was always a factor in our day-to-day lives. It helped us remember events and their temporal relationships. It provided an emotional and mnemonic backbone, which stayed the same year after year, with all of the individual and subjective experiences anchored around it. You physically felt the presence and passing of time.

I miss that in California. The first 5 years I spent in the Bay Area, I felt that time had stopped. There were two, maybe three seasons (rainy; dry but foggy; and dry and mildly warm). But the main problem was that transitions between them were slow and gradual. Each season was not that much different from the others. And that made me feel suspended in time. Things were happening and changing, days passed by fast and inevitably, but the passage of time as a whole was not tangible. I wondered whether it was just because I was getting older and my time perception had slowed down over the years. But then I moved to New England, and things got back to normal – each year was clearly marked, remembered, and felt. Back in the Bay Area – and again, years are flying by without me noticing them (and trust me, this is not a pleasant feeling).

Being in New England once again and seeing the very beginning of the fall (the summer is still in full swing, but a few red leaves here and there, an occasional rain, a cold breeze, and the smell of wet leaves on the ground add up to the unmistaken sense of impending autumn) made me think about the importance of changing seasons in our emotional lives. I talked about it to Tanya, my perennial Ukrainian travel companion, and Josh, who grew up in New England, and they both agree with me that this marker of time plays an important role in how we structure our lives and how we perceive time.

But it also made me wonder whether my friends who grew up in California and were never exposed to real changes in seasons have the same sense of the passage of time. Or maybe they use different markers to annotate their perception of time: holidays, vacations, sport seasons? Do these markers have the same emotional significance to them as season changes to people who grew up in the north? If these markers are established early in life and our mental clock is calibrated to follow them, do any change to their periodicity and manifestation would feel strange and unsettling (e.g., would it feel weird for people if Thanksgiving was moved from November to, let’s say, March)? I don’t know. I need to remember to ask them about it one of those unremarkable days.

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Addendum (January 2011): I've just spent a week in Lyon where temperatures were near freezing. I'm currently in New York, where it's -9 Celsius. And you know what?.. I hate to admit it, but I miss California weather. Apparently I've gone soft. Feeling like my face is about to freeze off is no longer in my repertoire of acceptable climatic variations.  "The times, they are a'changin"