Or perhaps it’s just my childhood.
“If we hadn’t our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries – the ice-storm: when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top – ice that is as bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dew-drops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia’s diamond plume. Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold-the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence. One cannot make the words too strong.” Mark Twain
I miss the change of seasons, not just the alternation of hot and wet but four seasons. I miss ice storms and the power going out. Now of course I would be responsible. But as a boy it was my parents’ problem and changes in routine–no school!–were welcome.
“The true object of all human life is play. Life is a task garden, heaven is a playground.” G. K. Chesterton
I miss thunderstorms and lightning, the just right warmth of autumn winds, the way that snow changes the landscape, and the brisk cold of winter giving way to spring. But my blood has changed, so now whether I return in summer or winter I am completely uncomfortable. But it wasn’t always this way.
