Attending kindergarten at the Little Red Schoolhouse in the French Quarter (then McDonogh 15), I learned the days of the week, the seasons, and the months of the year.
We sang songs about them; played games like “Good Morning, Mother Year”; and colored worksheets divided into quarters with a beach ball, piles of fallen leaves, snowmen, and spring flowers.
But the seasons depicted on those worksheets didn’t really correlate with my own life experience: Our leaves stayed on the trees and no matter how hard I prayed, snow just didn’t fall here.
Instead, I relied on the seasons all New Orleanians know: Saints season, the holidays, Mardi Gras, snowball/crawfish season, festival season, and hurricane season.
My mom, who grew up in Wisconsin, sometimes waxed nostalgic about how much she missed real autumn or real spring, but not knowing what I was missing, I never really understood.
Until I went to college in the Midwest.
It was stiflingly hot in those first few weeks in my un-air-conditioned dorm room, and so I initially welcomed the cooler mornings and evenings. As we moved through September, there was sometimes frost on the grass, which I thought was pretty, and by mid-October, the trees were absolutely ablaze with beauty — red and orange and yellow and burnt umber, a color I’d only ever seen in my big box of Crayolas. My new friends and I went apple-picking and explored a giant corn maze, and I suddenly got why my mom loved this season so much.
Until winter came.
Suddenly all those riotously colored leaves were dead and brown and all over the ground, which was covered in frost that wasn’t pretty anymore because the grass was also dead and brown. The trees were bare and sad, and the corn stalks were withering, and the sky was endlessly wet and gray. Then it snowed, which was briefly exciting, but then the snow was plowed into huge hills that turned black and disgusting. There was no color in the landscape, and it was so cold that it felt like a personal attack every time I stepped out of my door. Autumn had indeed been magical, just as my mom said, but there was no way it balanced out this nonsense. I decided seasons were definitely overrated.
Until spring came.
I’d never seen anything quite like a Midwestern spring. The sound of melting snow and ice was the most welcome noise I’d ever heard, and flowers started poking up through the ground, and the colors came back: pink and purple and blue and the aptly named spring green, a color I’d only ever seen in my big box of Crayolas. My friends and I went hiking and ate Thai food outside at sunset along the Missouri River, and I suddenly got why my mom loved this season so much.
But ultimately, it wasn’t enough. I hated winter so much that my dread of it ruined autumn and my lingering depression from it bled into spring.
I moved home almost 20 years ago. I have not missed real seasons even once.
Until my daughter went off to college in New York.
A much hardier person than I, she loves cold weather and snow – but even she was starting to fray by the middle of March after all of the snow New York got this year. And then: boom! Daffodils, chirping birds, ice cream cones, budding leaves. It almost makes me wax nostalgic about how much I miss real seasons.
But I think spring can be symbolic – rebirth, sunshine, renewed hope – wherever you are. And to me, the colors of a crawfish boil – red and yellow and white and green and pink – rival anything you could find anywhere else in the country, even if there isn’t a crayon that quite captures it yet.
