Myth of the Four Seasons

It was always difficult to say walking out the door in the too-early hours of the morning what the kind state of Minnesota would have to offer. Sometimes the air would be brisk, requiring a zipping up of the jacket on the move, while the leaves skirted across the intersection as if being called home. Other mornings would be curiously dark and white, with mounds of lifeless snow piled up to my shoulder on every corner, and without sunlight to bounce off of them and make my eyes squint. Yet some mornings, there would be a most friendly and golden sun, surprising me every time with its courtesy to rise.

There are some who say that there are only two seasons in Minnesota: Winter, and Road Construction, as if the very second the road becomes visible, workers in orange hats descend upon the pavement to fix it, somehow. There are others who are grateful to live in a place where they claim to experience all four seasons to the full effect. It never occurred to me that some places elsewhere this wasn’t the case. Our autumns are cool and colorful, our summers wild and glazed with sweat, our winters both at once bleak and vicious, and our springs are green, bountiful and beautiful as any.

The one thing that often gets overlooked, though, is that these seasons are not created equal. The year is never divided up fairly where I call home: We go through eight months of a frighteningly cold winter before the sun finally wears the ice down, dries up every puddle, and turns the mud into soft dirt where plants unfold in abundance. There are only two seasons, so far as I have seen it: The season to watch nature from the warmth of your window, and the season to sit in the backyard with friends, walk the train tracks all night long, and never fool around with coats. But we are grateful for that too, because the more arduous the winter, the sweeter the spring.