It’s been hot here lately, with blue skies and temperatures in the upper 20s most days—summer at its height.
But when I wake at five in the morning it is dark, and there is no working in the garden until nine in the evening anymore, unless it’s by head torch. The days are growing shorter, and there’s a feel to the air that speaks of the autumn to come.
The cricket chorus has grown over the past few days—the summer’s crop of insects maturing to mate and lay eggs before winter. The early apples have been harvested, and pumpkins are swelling on the vines. I harvested most of my dry beans last week, too.
Of course the summer crops—tomatoes, zucchini, eggplants, peppers, and beans—are still going strong, and will be for a while.But the seasons are turning.
I love it.
My husband and I lived for two and a half years in Panama back in the early 1990s, so we got to experience living almost on the equator. The daily temperature variation in Panama is greater than the yearly variation, and the day length variation is virtually imperceptible. The only seasonality is in rainfall—it rains from mid-March to mid-December, then stops entirely until mid-March again.
After living in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio for the first 22 years of my live, Panama was … well … boring from a seasonal perspective. I missed the annual markers of the Earth’s progress around the sun. Of course we had heat, but I missed the long days and drawn out sunsets of a high-latitude summer. In Panama, the sun leaps into the sky in the morning and drops like a stone below the horizon in the evening, and it does so with such precision and consistency, you can practically set your watch to it.
I missed the cold of winter, the dark days and long nights perfect for curling up with a book or sitting by the fire (though to be fair, Panama nights sometimes seemed long, because we had no electricity, one small table to sit at, and only a lopsided wooden chair and a tree stump to serve as seating).
I missed spring, for its slow unfurling of green, rising from the herbs on the forest floor to the tops of the trees as the season progressed. I missed autumn for its splash of yellows, oranges, and reds, the rime of frost on crisp mornings. I missed the bite of icy wind, the smell of snow.
New Zealand doesn’t get the extremes of seasonality I enjoyed in the northern United States. Our climate is heavily moderated by the vast Pacific Ocean in which we sit. And our native plants are largely evergreen, so green is the dominant colour all year round. But where I live, at a similar latitude to St. Paul, Minnesota (but of course on the other side of the equator), we have decent seasonality, and I love the changes throughout the year. People often ask what my favourite season is, and I have to say it’s all of them. Each season has something new and exciting to offer, and there’s no point in mourning the loss of long summer evenings, because they’ll be back. Instead, I welcome the short days, the excuse step away from the garden in the evenings. I look forward to bringing in the autumn harvest and filling the pantry with the fruits of summer.
So bring on the shorter days. Variety is the spice of life, after all—time for some spice.
Robinne Weiss 