There’s a building in the DFW Metroplex where I meet clients from time to time. All things being relative in the realm of office buildings, it’s a lovely space. On the outside, gleaming walls reach about as high above the horizon as one might find away from downtown, reflecting the azure Texas sky and (very) occasional cloud back to itself in cut-up geometrics. Inside, an enormous winding staircase carries a person out of the cavernous (and empty, save for the lone security guard behind a looming desk) lobby and onto The Floor, an endless sea of cubicles that teems with bobbing heads tethered by cords that dangle from ears and fingers skipping across boundless waves of keyboards.
Golden sun pours through expansive glass, pushing back the soft blue of the fluorescents, reviving hope of a natural world free of steel and plastic and acoustic fabrics meant to absorb the sounds that swell to crescendos of monotony and malaise in such a place.
Early each afternoon, window blinds on the south side close quietly on their own, even as they reopen on the north. Inside a dark closet somewhere in the building, a server unceremoniously knocks out the zeroes and ones of computer modeling that recognizes even minute adjustments for each day’s solar arc. Workers need not trouble themselves about the sun in their eyes; such glare will never arrive in this technological wonderland that reaches well beyond thermostats and HVAC systems to smooth potential discomforts and distinctions of the season.
It is fitting, I understand, that a person with no true internal compass, who transposes east and west as easily as a two and a three, should find himself in a place where solstice and equinox are nearly indistinguishable, where the peak of a season is marked only in degrees—on average, it feels like just ten or twenty—where Nature herself, not a computer, has managed to smooth seasonal distinctions to near invisibility. This weekend marks one complete trip around the sun since the hurricane they named Harvey leveled and washed away large swathes of this state and I relocated here in the wake of that storm, in part to work through its destruction, in part to prepare for the next one—really, many others—yet to come. It proved a season without seasons, a time marked as squares on a calendar more than by familiar cues: the rising or dropping of temperatures, the fullness or nakedness of trees, the kinds of produce that are in season, and of course, the snow.
The grass outside my window is as green and lush today as it is any other day, any other month. The caretaker waters and nourishes it all year long, never allowing it to pull on its brown wool coat. The proximity to even hotter climes means fresh produce of any kind is always in season. The birds never leave, even in January brazenly hopping around on the roof of my car and refusing to move when I load my groceries in the parking lot. I realized I’d lost track of the changing of the vernal guard when the weather man suggested picking berries in “the cool of the day” at a time when mercury hovered at 83 degrees when I got up at five o’clock in the morning. I assumed, without consulting a calendar, that we were in the heart of summer, maybe even approaching the turn when the days would start to grow shorter, nights might drop into the seventies. The bluebells had already come and gone. And then the crepe myrtle bloomed in early June, her thick, delicious pink clusters covering knuckly, sinewy branches. I knew we’d only started.
It’s disorienting, though not distressing. As with every changing season, this season of no seasons requires a kind of recalibration. I know it’s fall because we’re watching the brew of hurricanes again. A friend from up north shared some sun sweet yellow cherry tomatoes with me, the kind I used to grow in my garden that always erupted in August to remind me summer was coming to a close. I hear the kids are going back to school this week, so I need to watch for the school zone speed limit to be active again. And I suppose the bird population will start to tick up soon. The blinds will know when to open, and when to close. The sun will pour in, and I’ll have no need to shield my eyes.
Photo by J.B., Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by Will Willigham.
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Megan Willome says
LW, it takes creativity to live here, to watch and listen for those small shifts that signal a season change.
I told a friend on Maine that I knew fall was here because I could wear jeans to an evening football game without sweating. I spend a few minutes outside every afternoon, and when it was 107, the cicadas were loud. Now they’re quiet. When the first cool front comes, the crickets will invade. Acorns are beginning to drop; I’m collecting them in a cup. The crepe myrtles look tired, their hot pink blooms heavy, but the beautyberry bushes are all a’purple. The hummingbirds are still busy, so summer hasn’t truly gone.
The other way to deal with the mostly invisible seasons is to do what all good Texans do: Vacation in Colorado.
Will Willingham says
Megan, it’s true, and even I can see it. There are signs all around, subtle as they may be, and of course, unfamiliar. But I’m learning them, and it is a delight in so many ways.
The cicadas, oh my. My place faces a reasonably busy roadway, so it can be a little on the noisy side at times. I remember telling myself, probably in July, that really, the traffic isn’t all that loud. I certainly couldn’t hear it over the rasp and roar of the cicadas. But yes, I have been waiting for the acorns (have not seen them here yet this year) as they were just starting to drop around the time I got here. I think I have a poem about them (and a few other early-Texas poems) somewhere…
Sandra Heska King says
First, I love the word “lovely.”
This whole thing is fabulous. We are not quite at the two-year mark of living in a season of no seasons and searching far and wide for hints of fall. Christmas is different, too. And there are big birds right outside my door that may or may not fly off when I step out–mostly not. I also never dreamed I’d become such a fall weather watching fanatic.
I’m waiting on those Texas poems. Watch out for the scorpions.
Will Willingham says
Here you go. A couple of them, anyway, the ones about acorns:
Dendrology
To research the acorn
is to hear the crunching
underfoot of words
like peduncle, cotyledon,
trifid apex and epicotyl
when all I know
for sure is that the nuts
that fall from the mighty
oak (the defacto crown
of the Quercus family)
with their fuzzy little cupules
fit snugly on their heads,
are much larger
on the other side of the canal.
And:
Texas
Add to the things
I didn’t know about
Texas: the great oaks—
so many brown leaves
open-palmed
on the pavement,
so many acorns
pattering,
like cloudbursts
as I walk beneath.
Then it hit me:
so many things
I didn’t know about.
Slking1@sbcglobal.net says
“Then it hit me”
I love these.
Will Willingham says
It did, literally. 😉
Megan Willome says
It’s so fun to see my state through your observant eyes.
Katie says
LW,
Enjoyed this post.
Liked:
”so many brown leaves
open-palmed
so many acorns
pattering,
like cloud bursts”
Bethany R. says
“And then the crepe myrtle bloomed in early June, her thick, delicious pink clusters covering knuckly, sinewy branches.” Love that description.
Donna Falcone says
It’s disorienting, though not distressing.
I’m still striving knowing, for me, disorientation comes with its own brand of distress.
You writing is so peaceful. This is so beautiful.
Laura Lynn Brown says
So many nicely wrought sentences here, not just the one about the crape myrtles (which kind of redeems them for me; I think I formed my opinion of them based on some unfortunate prunings (note to self: never judge (a person or a plant) by a bad haircut)).
I suppose the Texan sunset isn’t coming as noticeably earlier as it did in your previous latitude. Does the light itself seem different in Texas? I know light is different in different places but I don’t understand how, exactly.
How handy of the blinds to automatically keep from blinding you. But I wonder, is something lost in not having to get up and adjust them, or not being able to?
I look forward to more Texas stories, LW.
Megan Willome says
Yes! More, please!
Katie says
Agree, Laura about LW’s sentences being nicely wrought:)
Liked: “(note to self: never judge (a person or a plant) by a bad haircut)).
Also, the question you ask in your last paragraph.
L.L. Barkat says
This is classic LW writing, and, as such, makes me very happy. I love the layers, and the nuances.
Richard Maxson says
Beautiful story, LW. We are in our first full Texas year. I don’t know for sure, but it seems we have gone from the sweltering season into the rainy season considering August and September. I appreciate your tips on what to watch for. We don’t water our “natural” yard, so the “brown wool coat” showed itself in all its mysterious glory. We may name the yard Lazarus. After two weeks of rain it is green and thick and in need of mowing.
Over near Canyon Lake dam there is a sycamore behaving in Texas as they have in Arkansas and elsewhere I’ve lived with them—first out in Spring, first to turn in Fall. My wife just bought four Crepe Myrtles that also seem to have a consistency place to place.