What Season is This Anyway?

Winter Skies

Folks in Western Montana where I just visited, they have no idea what season it is. 50 degrees one day. Two inches of snow the next morning. Maples, Willows, and daffodils all swelling into emminent bloom. One day the natives hunker down for below-zero blasts, and the next, try to decide whether to open their windows for a bit of fresh air in the hot sunshine. Here may just be the orignation of the phrase, "If you don't like the weather, wait 15 minutes."

Boots Today

I have lived in several states, and all the residents use this adage as if it only fits their region, (which I find humorous but also rather endearing). And more than anything, it illustrates the oft-bemoaned fact that weather is just not willing to be put in a box, turned off on a certain date, called forth at our convenience. This, of course, comes as no surprise to anyone. We just want to get into authentic springtime  A: With enough precipitation to make it through the growing season and prevent fires, and B: Without having to keep both winter and summer wardrobes stuffed in our closets.

Flip-flops Tomorrow

But on a more philosophical scale,  it has me pondering again this whole thing about seasons.  In particular, how, though summer, autumn, winter, spring do eventually arrive, while they are coming and going, and sometimes in between, they seem like other seasons. Hang with me here, because my point is that just like seasons in the natural, seasons in our life are not cut and dried with nice straight lines to help us know when we've crossed into the next one. We don't even have a calendar that announces the equinoxes. We just have one day at a time, and as those days roll by, our seasons change. We are born. We grow, enter school, navigate through teenagerhood  and into adulthood.

Circa 2006

These things are perhaps the closest we come to lines of demarcation in our lives. And yet--within each season, who knows what the "weather" will be from one day to the next. Take parenting, for example. I'm still in that season, parenting our last couple of teens remaining at home, and sometimes I find I'm longing for a more familiar time; one that had the long, golden mellowness of summer--smaller issues like bumped heads, broken toys, and tangled hair. Things a mom can take care of with one hand behind her back. (Mostly)

But  parenting looks so different as these last couple of eaglets fast-track to the brink of adulthood. They're headed right into the sunshine, flying toward their next season. But just when I think I can store the winter gear, the wind kicks up. What tool do I pull out for this one? What wisdom do I apply here? (Boots or flip-flops?) And why--this is perhaps my greatest peeve--WHY did the electronic world bring us those time-wasting, brain-jelling hand-held devices to complicate this last stage of parenthood, because you just know that every other teen in the universe is allowed to use them 24/7 with no limits and you are the only--I repeat--the only mean parent on the planet. Urg.

Iris after the Rain

Should I publish that mini-rant? Hmmm. I suppose I will because, after all, I'm waiting 15 minutes for the weather to change, the issues to morph, the brilliancy of who they are to outshine the logistics of the moment. And that's my point, whether it's parenting, relationships, work, age--Perhaps it's not so important to be able to pin down exactly where we are in our process of life as to know that no matter what it looks like at the moment, the season always arrives.

Maybe it doesn't stay long, but it does, eventually, arrive. :-)