I have now lived through all of Patagonia’s seasons. In most parts of the world there are four seasons—others just count two: rainy and dry. In places like Quito, Ecuador, there is eternal spring. Here we are very busy with seasons. It seems we have six, maybe even eight, and each one has a good side and a not-so-good side.
The first season I lived through was last year’s monsoon months. Of all the times of year (thus far, in my opinion), that is the most dramatic and unpredictable. Rain is the best part of the monsoons – the earth is waiting with bated breath for those first drops, as are we all. Sunsets and skies in general are the second best thing, and thunder and lightning are up there as well because they provide drama, even some adrenaline. The hills and fields turn green, livestock gets to graze, we can take a break from watering our gardens, and it’s easy to forget that we live in a parched part of the world.
The downside to July, August and most of September involves mosquitoes, flies, and a host of other new-to-me insects that I don’t quite trust. Then there’s the humidity and sometimes mud and the threat of floods. Let’s not forget the snakes.
Then, suddenly, the rains stop. The next season is brief – a transition between heat and cold. The days are hot without the cloud cover. The birds have mostly gone away and new bugs come on the scene, millions of hopping vermin. Happily grackles stick around and one afternoon a team of them arrived and dined on our grasshoppers. That was nice, but how many grasshoppers can a grackle eat? Not enough.
Again, seemingly overnight, I find myself freezing under summer’s cotton blankets. It’s October, and although the grasshoppers are still around, now eating the last of the privet hedge I planted in July, the temperatures are just right. Cold nights, days in the 70s and 80s, a sky full of stars. Almost perfect, BUT then the desert shows its teeth in the form of small spiny weapons shed by dying plants that seem to attach themselves to every moving, living thing. I pull burrs from the dog’s paws, comb them from her coat, and I walk around digging at my ankles where thin needles from some nasty plant have imbedded themselves in my socks and shoe linings.
I can’t remember the downside to the season that leads up to Christmas. Of course, the days are short which means the nights are long and the cold has more chance to get a hold on the high desert, but the grasshoppers are fading away, the burrs and spines have mostly dispersed, and new varieties of birds seem to arrive each day.
But winter took me by surprise. I hadn’t thought southern Arizona would get so cold. I still had some winter clothes, but I bought a puffy down parka so I could take walks in the early morning which, despite the bitter cold is my favorite time of year to walk. The world is frozen, still and sharply defined. The ravens’ voices ring out as the hills turn pink and the dry plants crunch under foot. The world seems to be holding its breath until the sun warms things up. The winter cold is both a blessing and a curse.
These seasons don’t flow into one another. They seem to occur almost over night. One day it’s cold, the next it’s warm and quickly it’s just plain hot. And that brings us to June–a season onto itself. Heat. It’s all about heat. I was moving last June and my memories of the heat are clouded by packing and unpacking and hauling boxes and cleaning, all those miserable chores made worse by relentless high temperatures. Was there anything good about that month? I cannot recall anything except that all that heat ultimately brings the gift of the dramatic and unpredictable monsoon storms.