The Measure of Seasons

Fall, for adults, is the slow dying of the year, shedding its plumage at the most beautiful moment only to entropy in the wheels of cars and the sides of the street. Brilliant heat gives way to quiet chill, light receding like the hairline of some middle manager, until the evenings are all but nonexistent. It means getting out winter clothes and winter gear. It means preparation, for a nearly endless array of parties and dinners that come up in the next season. Fall is all forethought, and no reflection. For Adults.

For children, fall is the beginning of the year, glorious in its promise, and dreadful for all those moments when you arrive in the new classroom with the new teacher, and desperately scan for a friend, as you notice other kids, who clearly had more foresight, already murmuring with one another in little groups. And just as you resign yourself to a friendless year, you hear a familiar voice and see a friend waving you over. And when leaves fall, its celebration, bounding through their piles that were painstakingly raked together by your parents destroying the mounds that seemed just like a burial of the season. Yet, when you do so, in that splash of color and motion that they make for a brief moment, it seems to breathe a new life into the brittle days. The wind cuts through you, as bold as you feel with a summer’s worth of scabbed knees and scarred limbs upon you, as you race through the last hours of evening sunlight. And even then, when it grows bitter and cold at nights, and you’re forced in earlier, there is still the anticipation: September for school, October for Halloween, November for Thanksgiving, December for the Holidays. Fall is the anticipation of the year. For Children.

For adults, winter is a drunken procession. There are parties and further parties, a hundred or so miserly visitations to the houses of friends or friends of friends, sometimes to those of acquaintances and the acquaintances of acquaintances. They drag along children if they plan to have a very good time, and sometimes one of their children will catch them doing something very stupid whilst they are very drunk. But there are also the evenings of chatter around a dinner table, with closer friends, the wine running like a river. Winter is all merriment, without even the chance for knowledge. For Adults.

For children, winter is partly exhilaration, partly boredom, the round-and-down, slip-shod maneuverings of a sled, and those long nights spent trapped in the basements of your parent’s friends, with their own children, struggling to not make conversation as you watch Disney films you’ve seen a dozen or more times or playing with toys that are like your toys, but that belong to another and so are to be either envied or scorned, and usually it’s the former. And these times, in carpeted basements so distinct from your own, with its cold cement floor, they drag on as though you were encased in amber, your movements measured not in seconds but eons. But then, with your friends or siblings, hiding out in the great snow trenches dug in the back yard, your brother on the hill, as always, raining down on you those specialties of his, snow packed with ice chunks at the center and you have to really concentrate not to be hit. So you spent most of the day with your face being driven right into the snow, and when alls said and done your cheeks are ruddy and your nose is scrapped, and while your drinking cocoa afterwards, you press the mug right up against your cheek. At those moments, those days, time is in free fall, and before you know it you’ve hit the bottom of break, and its school again. For children, winter is an interlude of tremendous velocity and, seemingly, endless excitement. For children.