The Role of the Seasons.

I came around the corner of my house at 5 o’clock this afternoon and was surprised to see how long my shadow was on the path. I noticed that the heat of the sun on my back was milder, less intimidating, than I’d grown used to of late. And then I felt the cold breeze in my hair and on my ears which picked up the occasional whistle in the trees when the wind strengthened for a moment. It seemed to whisper stridently and insistently: ‘Not long to go now. Autumn is almost here.’

And that’s how life is, of course, pulling you through the seasons year after year, each one startling you slightly because you were just getting used to the previous one. It encourages recollections of a few earlier seasons which were notable enough to remember. There was the long, hot, dry summer in my twenties when standpipes were being erected in the streets in readiness for the cessation of piped water supplies. There was the bitterly cold and snowy winter in my thirties when I had 2ft snowdrifts in the loft, and the water in the bathroom toilet had a layer of ice on it. And there was that spring only fourteen years ago when April was replete with warm sunshine and butterflies, but the summer which followed was largely cold and wet.

But most of the seasons over a lifetime meld into a generality of minor memories. Fishing and snorkelling on holiday, sliding down the browning grass of Tanner’s Bank on the shiny side of a piece of hardboard, waking up one Sunday morning with no school to go to but a snow-buried landscape in which to play, the thrilling sight of a bluebell wood on a school nature walk one sunny April day many faded moons ago.

Now the seasons fly by at a seemingly dizzying speed. They are the means by which we measure the year, and a reminder that the sum of the years is finite for each and every one of us. They are the most potent agents of time which has always lighted we fools the way to dusty death. And however they might change as the reckless, ignorant and selfish human animal unthinkingly abuses nature’s imperatives, they always will be.