The Cycle of the Seasons - and Dead Trees

Today with temperatures in the low 60's feels like a blustery fall day. Never having lived in a place with less than four seasons, the annual changes are embodied in my bones. At least the old pattern is.

I remember when I kept track when different spring bulbs would pierce the soil in springtime. After about five years, I quit recording the data —  because the dates of their emergence varied so little. I could set my internal clock by the emergence of snowdrops or daffodils.

A mallard pair used to wattle across our backyard every April 23rd. We knew they were the same pair because the drake walked with a limp as he protected his "bride.". One year when spring was a bit late, our pond was still frozen when they arrived. The drake positioned himself in the middle of the pond as if to say "melt baby melt —  because I have arrived." Eventually they stopped coming, probably because they had lived out their life span.

But now all the reliable signs are not happening. I think back to our crossing the North Pacific by boat this past spring and encountering sea ice from the high Arctic, ice floes so dense that we had to turn back to Japan and find another route to North America. Ice that should not have been there, but was the result of too-early melting. I read article after article about the melting ice pack in the Arctic and worry about our future.

Closer to home, garden perennials are confused. Cone flowers bloomed in July —  not August. The sequence of blooms in the spring did not follow their usual pattern. And drought, though not as severe here as further south, has had devastating effects on grass, gardens and crops.

One result has been dying trees. I want to weep as we travel around our metropolitan area. A magnificent maple shorn of its leaves in August. A flowering crab apple at the entry road to our neighborhood that retained its reddish leaves all summer now looks more forlorn as the days go by. A fifty-year-old silver maple a block further that looks like a tree mid-winter — no leaves whatsoever. Evergreens that no longer carry their green coats of needles. The list goes on.

Will this summer's "off-cycle" be an anomaly? And next year see a return to normal patterns of growth, maturation, and preparation for winter? I wish that would be the case — but I am afraid. Afraid that what has been set in motion is the future. More drought. More extreme weather. More fires. And re-calibrating my internal clock as the days grow shorter and cool air from Canada tells us winter is coming.