Seasonal Confusion – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week on the Wednesday Blog, I have a bone to pick with the weather. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane

This week on the Wednesday Blog, I have a bone to pick with the weather.

I wouldn’t be a good Midwesterner, nor even a good human being, if I didn’t always have the weather as a fall back conversation topic. There’s always something going on out there to comment on. This week I’m befuddled by the sudden shifting of the moment from a prolonged summertime heat that lasted throughout September to a sudden crisp Fall chill which made the date, now in the second week of this month, all the clearer to me.

My own human surprise at the sudden change of weather might best be described with a mechanical being, in this case the idea that Star Trek‘s android Lieutenant Commander Data had a functioning internal chronometer that kept him accurate to the nanosecond. Yet that chronometer could be turned off if he wanted, though before that was suggested to him, Data hadn’t ever considered the possibility. I’ve had my odd week where I’ve lost track of time, whether due to sickness or exhaustion. So, to come to this week and be caught unaware that the warm days of Summer are truly behind us when they seemed interminable in Kansas City struck me harder to believe than I expected.

In my current situation this means that I’m closer now to Thanksgiving than the start of this Fall Semester when I began my new and current job teaching middle schoolers. It also means that the late Fall deadlines that I have for written submissions are indeed closer than they may have initially appeared. We passed by the usual markers of the changing of the seasons, and I recognized them as I watched them go by; yet I think because I haven’t spent a full year in Kansas City since 2019 I found myself unassuming when the hot days continued even as the Sun began to set sooner over the Great Plains to our west, venturing ever as it does each day towards the Rockies, Deserts, and Pacific beyond.

On Monday, my photo app reminded me that 4 years ago this week I made my first trip home after the big move east to Binghamton, and in the pictures featuring my beloved and dearly missed dog Noel in my arms I’m wearing the same sort of woolen sweater I’d usually don when indoors throughout the Winter. So, even in that moment when my seasonal expectations were still attuned to Kansas City’s climate, by now I’d be far colder than I am today.

It’s curious considering that I was told to expect earlier winters when I was in Binghamton, yet even there I only began to don my winter coat by about the first week of October. It seems reasonable to assume then that all of this is due to changes in our climate, a topic I’ve written about a great deal in this blog of late. What strikes me the most about 2023 has been the stability of our climate over most of the past four months. My suspicion long term is that the extreme heat we experienced in the late Summer, which drove my students indoors for recess for a week, and the extreme cold we felt around Christmas last year will become our new normal. I hope then, that we can adjust properly to this new normal, both in our energy use and in our ways of living throughout the changing seasons. I grew up knowing Winter to be long, cold, and snowy, Spring to be stormy, Summer to be long, hot, and dry, and Fall to be of crisp with occasional storms. Now though, the frosts of Winter “come pale, meager, and cold” to quote Henry Purcell’s The Fairie Queen, for far longer in a mirror to the lengthening Summer heat. Should I be fortunate enough to have children, my lived wisdom of the seasons may prove useless to them in their own brave new world. Certainly, the moderation which brought my ancestors to this middle bit of the North American continent is fast fading from view.

My seasonal confusion is in part born out of how fast my life is moving at this moment, juggling three jobs and trying to maintain my research all at the same time. Still, as I feel the crisp air filter in while writing this, I am eager to see another Fall arrive like all the others I’ve known.