#Reverb12. Day 4: Cycle

"Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence
Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance
Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence
Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance."
-   Yoko Ono, Season of Glass

 Day 4: Cycle

Right now it is late autumn in New England. The leaves are in mushy piles and the trees are bare. Three very small snow storms have coated the land in a really tiny coating. For a moment it looked like Christmas and I remembered our actual chances of having a white Christmas are pretty low. 

I like each season for different reasons. If I lived in the desert somewhere I would have a really tough time. Right now it's  too cold to hike (we did a 33F hike recently in Maine) and there's no snow to snowshoe. The woods are bare and the critters are few and far between.

I was thinking about cycles this morning. How this time of year I can see the river from my kitchen window (no leaves blocking). How the new leaves of spring show up at my home in MA before the one in Maine. How I'm actually wearing socks to work versus getting away with flipflops late March- early October. Cycles are important. If you skip on part of a cycle things just don't work out. If there's not enough snow, there's not enough maple syrup. If there's not enough snow my shallow well freezes and the cottage does not have water during the winter. If we have 80 degree days in March (as we did last year) the bug population is fierce. If we have the hottest August *ever* in Boston that equals no fresh cucumbers (darn powdery mildew). 

What sort of cycles do you depend on?

"Gardeners , like everyone else, live second by second and minute by minute.  What we see at one particular moment is then and there before us.  But there is a second way of seeing.  Seeing with the eye of memory, not the eye of our anatomy, calls up days and seasons past and years gone by."  
-  Allen Lacy, The Gardener's Eye, 1992, p. 16