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Time In Texas (March 2009)

This essay was originally published on FlamingBuffalo on 29 March, 2009.

“but there is no sense of time without seasons, it’s weird when you’re used to measuring time by looking out the window and all of a sudden nothing really changes”

The Question

How do people measure time without seasons?

I ask, simply, because now that I have been living in a place without a dramatic seasonal change throughout the year I do not feel as though time is passing by.  On a small scale it is the same as it has always been; a day is still a day, a week is still a week, yet when the year seems to skip winter time does not progress.  When the weather is 70 degrees and sunny from October until April the view outside the window does not change. 

The Past

Growing up in Michigan I saw the seasons on a brutal scale.  Winters brought with them snow, enough that I became much more familiar with a snow-shovel, mittens, and thick coats than I would like to have been.  Every fall was a countdown to the first snow of the year - it was a wonderful gift when it came after Halloween - but that was rare.  A full half of an inhabitant’s closet was filled with the outerwear that allowed for survival in a winter of the industrial midwest.

In the fall leaves dominated.  The trees that that covered the landscape changed color completely.  There was no ignoring it, no matter how caught up one was in the football season.  Over the course of a few weeks, when I walked out the door, trees that had been green for the previous half year were transformed into the terrain from a Bob Ross painting.  The snow removal that was to come with the winter was preceded by hours of raking and burning leaves, which if left alone, would drift like snow and block drives and walking paths.

Spring and summer, though separate, and separated by distinctions in temperature and activity of the inhabitants, were inexorably linked.  The white nothing of winter was replaced by a green that must rival that of Ireland (the fact that your humble author would love nothing more than to be seen as a modern-day Joycean intellectual has absolutely nothing to do with that observation).  Along with fall, the outdoor activity of the people during these seasons was so different than that of winter - consider softball vs. ice fishing, or even the massive difference in effort of walking down the street in January and July.

The Truth

In Michigan spring and summer mean something.  They are a relief, a break, a chance for life to start anew.  But what need for regeneration is there in a place where summer never dies?  And don’t let them fool you - when I moved I was told “no, there are distinct seasons, just not as severe as ya’ll are used to.” 

Well, they lied to me.  Things don’t change here.

I look out my window now and it looks the same as in September.  The trees, the sky, the people, everything looks the same.  People wear shorts in January and July.  It has snowed one time in two years.  One time!  How can winter mean anything in a place where it never stays cold enough to kill the life that spring and summer created?  The simple answer is that it can’t.  The same yearly cycles of summer and winter, death and rebirth, hope in spring and despair in winter, never come to pass. 

Why This Matters

This brings the narrative back to the question: How do people measure time without seasons?  Because now, in this place, time has stopped.  Life does not cycle.  Things stay the same.  Time stops.

I look out the window and don’t know what season it is automatically.  I don’t know what came before, I don’t know what comes next.  This entire place is an aberration of time.  This place is outside the rules of time I understand.  It does not follow the accepted cycles.  Yet, I grow older - while this place remains un-aging, unchanging - untimed, timeless.

The seasons do not cycle in this place, yet somehow time still goes on, unnoticed and unnoticeable.