Turn, turn, turn

It’s mid-November. The leaves on the trees have not turned red or orange or even brown. There’s no brisk bite to the air. No desire to walk a bit more quickly to get out of the chill. No need for blankets or scarves or wool sweaters. No looking up at the grey clouds and wondering if they might, just this once, contain snow.

I didn’t expect to miss seasons so much.

It’s not that Mbale doesn’t have seasons at all. We have the rainy season, and we have the dry season—perhaps more aptly called the slightly-less-rainy season. As December approaches, the rains are letting up a bit, and the sun seems to be burning a bit more brightly than it did last month. Sunscreen becomes a necessity instead of just a good idea.

It’s not that I miss the cold that much. No, I think what’s more troubling to me right now is that it’s mid-November, and I don’t know what happened to August, September, or October. Without the subtle transition of summer to fall, fall to winter, time seems to slip by unheeded. Or bound past in jack-rabbit leaps. I don’t know which—and that’s the problem. I didn’t realize how much I depended on crunchy leaves and hot chocolate and daffodils to divide life into orderly, manageable amounts of time.

The changing of seasons means not only the passage of a year, but the passage of a lifetime—the boundless energy of youthful spring, the summer and fall of adulthood, and finally the winter of old age, which then gives way for the next generation of spring chickens. But here, I feel ill at ease with this analogy. Things can’t age, can’t mature at their proper time, in the land of perpetual summer.