People from home are finding it hard to believe me now, at the end of January, but I miss the seasons.  It’s so bizarro to have seasons that not only run backward, but also don’t really happen at full strength.  Basically, the way it seems to me after one year is that the Sydney summer is long, very hot, and muggy.  Then it sort of gets cooler and stuff and stays cool for about three months, but the landscape doesn’t change — no leaves fall, no snow comes.  It just gets cool, and because the buildings don’t have insulation or heating, it gets cold and damp inside your house.  Then it starts to warm back up until it is reliably hot and muggy again.

I miss the snow, and not just because of the hot-wind days that we’ve been having here.  I like the atmosphere of snow.  It also opens up the possibility for spring as I know it — trickling melting ice, green shoots poking up through the mud.  I don’t mind summer, although nowadays I sometimes want to ask it, “How can I miss you if you won’t go away?”  And I definitely miss the New York fall, with leaves and pumpkins and wearing socks again!

Also, seasons, in my mind, are tied up with holidays.  Holidays here obviously happen at the opposite times.  Easter is an autumn holiday (or late summer, really, because summer is so long).  Other holidays become non-entities, like Halloween, which is seen as a tacky American thing and is also a summer holiday.  No hayrides or Indian corn here, I can tell you.  In general, holidays here are not actually that big.  I was surprised by Christmas this year, because everyone talks up the “Aussie beach Christmas” and for some reason the gossip got me to thinking that an Aussie Christmas is the biggest holiday of the year, far bigger than an American Christmas.  Well, no.  I had a nice Christmas but I was sort of taken aback by how not-celebrated it is, when everyone makes such a big deal about it.  I get the feeling that people here like their holidays for the fact that they get off work, but they don’t care much about the trappings.

It can get really confusing.  We traveled to the mountains in August for our anniversary, and they have more seasonal weather up there, they get a dusting of snow in the winter and stuff.  When we were there, crocuses and grape hyacinths were poking through.  Recently, I thought to myself, “Oh, Easter’s coming up in a couple of months, so our anniversary must be getting near… wait… when is our anniversary?  Spring, right?”  Oh, you tricky grape hyacinths.

Coming from the United States, the land of the monthly occasion to seasonally decorate, it seems weird and depressing to me to not have a lot of major holidays.  If they made one of those school timelines for kindergarteners where they have a different picture to represent each month, I’m not sure what they would put.  I guess like nine versions of kids going to the beach, and three kids who are damp and bored.

Filed in Uncategorized on Wednesday, January 27, 2010 ·