So now is the time of year that I, and others, begin to pine for something a little more tangible. Something a little more like this:
and less like this:
So how can one experience the seasons, the environmental rhythm in a place where the rhythm is so subtle? My good friend Samantha Holloway has been grappling with this question for awhile now. She has a blog called A Year of Living
She describes her effort thus:
So I'm just a girl like any other, poorish, white, work in a shop in a tourist area of Florida-- but I want to be healthy and I want to see if I can manage to live a whole year only eating what's seasonal and what's meant to be eaten each month. Starting Jan 1, 2009, I'm going to try my best. Until then, this is where I'm going to post all my facts and sources so I can find them again when I write the book that will encapsulate all I go through this coming year.
Care to come with me?
That is one interesting response, but are there others?
So dear readers (who I hope and speculate are out there), what are your thoughts? Do you have any tried and true methods for observing the rhythm of the seasons? Are there things that mark seasonal change in Florida that I and others are missing? What do you do to get in the spirit of the season? I'm planning on doing a write up and response to this at some point so any comment would be greatly appreciated.
4 comments:
I, for one, think more in terms of what's around then in what season it is up here. There's the time when all the ibises are out on the lake, the time when everywhere you look is purple with spiderworts, the time when all the Virginia creeper suddenly turns red, the time when the day is too hot to make it downtown without being drenched, the time when nights get misty, the time when cicadas sing all day... Admittedly, some of these things overlap. Depends on my mood and what I'm noticing, I guess, but here's an example: we went out to lunch the other day and I looked around and it was the first time I noticed that the light was different. Whiter, lighter, less of that horrible yellow denseness of summer.
As for my project, I'm hoping that these things translate into food availability; as for myself, it's pretty much how I keep myself sane when my internal clock is yearning for four even seasons of noticeable difference, and my eyeballs are telling me it's all the same. We joke that the seasons are Summer, Almost Summer and Still Kinda Summer, or that they are seen through very subtle shifts in the color of the sand, and both of these are a little true, but not the whole picture. You know how I despise large chunks of Florida-time, and it's taken ages to accomplish, but I've gradually come to see the shifts, and when I pay attention, I know I'm shifting with it. More active in the spring and fall, sleepier and more nocturnal in the summer, just sleepier in the winter.
~:)
ps: your post is odd; two drafts up? not that i mind being quoted twice or anything...
I personally never got into the "Christmas Spirit"... or any other real holiday spirit for that matter, once I moved to Florida. Easterly springs I associate with cool, dewy mornings. Halloween and Thanksgiving times I remember chilled windy nights and maybe a hint of snow; giving way into Christmas, heavy with the scent of frost and making a mad dash through parking lots in the slush to get that perfect ornament for the tree this year.
In Florida I find very few people that seem to get quite as hyped about any holiday the same way. But perhaps that's my issue as a transplant. It doesn't have the same social feel to it though, and it's kind of sad for me
I've lived here since I was born and have never felt I experience a lack of seasons. It's easy for someone who didn't grow up here to say that, but that is just because it's different. Frankly I don't mind not having to shovel snow or spend my winter locked inside. The transitions between the seasons are subtle, but oh so different. When I'm scraping ice off my windshield on a winter morning I can hardly remember what it was like to be in my swimsuit that summer, and visa versa. Also, in response to the comment above- myself and everyone I know who lives in Florida gets just as excited about the holidays as the next guy. The first cool day I'm rushing out to buy pumpkins to carve and make seeds. Thanksgiving is wonderful when you can eat your meal on the back porch in jeans and a tshirt. Christmas is awesome when you can return from an evening walk with the dog, looking at all of the lights, breathing in and feeling the cold on your nose and fingertips, then take off your sweater and decorate the tree with fireplace lit and no need for the heater.
The smell of bug repellent on the fourth of July brings fond memories and it's lovely to eat homemade icecream while watching the rain that comes and goes providing brief breaks from the sun and swimming pool.
Oh I love Florida. If it weren't for all the a-holes in Tampa I'd consider living here forever.
Sam,
Thanks for the comment, and thanks also for catching my gaffe. It is fixed. I'm working, (and worked before when I was here) on becoming more in-tune with it all again. I'm also experiencing it in a different way because Erika is trying to get in tune with it too.
Ospreybarf and Greenbandana,
I think it is of course on one level absurd to think of basing seasonal ideas on another place as though it were normative, so in that respect Greenbandana, I think you are right when you say that it is just different. And yet how does one reconcile that difference, is it just a process of getting used to it?
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