The First Day of... oh hey, look, a penny!

I’m always a little wary when the first day of a season comes around.


It’s the same way I feel about setting up an appointment to take family pictures. I feel like if I talk about it in the hearing of my children, they will wait until five minutes before departure and then bash some very visible part of their body (usually their face) into the nearest hard or pointy surface, thus creating the illusion, by having a terrible bruise or gaping wound captured in a rarely-taken family photo, that this is their normal state of being, and that I, as their parent, allow them to be constantly injured in this fashion. I don’t say things to them like, “We’re going to take pictures this weekend! Isn’t that exciting?!” Instead, I say things like, “Look at this pretty dress you get to wear! Isn’t that exciting?!”


Whenever it nears one of those days in the year when the calendar begins to claim that the season is changing, I get a bit annoyed. The calendar can’t know when it’s autumn; it has no mechanism for looking outside and seeing that we haven’t had a hot day for weeks. It’s already autumn. It’s not like the trees are going to check the calendar and automatically drop all their leaves tomorrow, just because it says so.


The only thing I feel that putting the change of a season on a particular day does for us is give us unrealistic expectations. The only thing I predict will happen weather-wise tomorrow is that either it will be blazingly hot or it will dump a ton of snow, just to spite the calendar. Like, “It’s fall now, eh? Well, take this! That’ll teach you to tell me my business.”


It seems to me that the only thing that happens on the first day of winter is that it’s already been snowing for weeks, the only thing that the first day of spring brings is news that it’s still cold and wintry, and the only thing that happens on the first day of summer is that it’s either still cool from springtime weather or already above 100 degrees. The weather doesn’t happen on our timetable. Saying, “It’s definitely spring now!” as you stand in front of a window while the snow blusters down on the other side of it just makes you seem stupid to me.


When this time of year rolls around, I tend to avoid looking at calendars that announce the manmade decision for the season change. I stop talking about the weather and try to ignore whatever is going on in the sky. I don’t say things like, “Autumn is my favorite! I can’t wait for the leaves to start turning!” Instead I say things like, “I know we had the spaghetti sauce earlier this week but you didn’t make spaghetti, you made campanelle, so do you mind if we have spaghetti for dinner so we can finish off the sauce? It’s just going to go bad in the refrigerator if we don’t eat it. We’ll make garlic bread.”