Summer Doldrums and Seasonal Change

Let's try something a little less rambling this time. It's midsummer, and it'll be over before we know it. The one season of the year that manages to be simultaneously ephemeral and yet interminable.

Everyone associates spring with youth and love. Your fancy is to conveniently crystallize and bloom into young, idealistic - and ultimately likely doomed - love. All the while, nature responds by making it impossible to breathe while making out by assailing us with a torrent of pollen. (You can literally walk outside for a minute and return completely caked in the stuff, awash in nature's bukkake. (And if you don't know what that means, you're probably better off not knowing, trust me.))

To me, autumn's always seemed the more romantic of the seasons. To step outside and breathe deep the cool, crisp air and feel alive. (Unless you live in the south, anyway. Summer's kind of an oaf down here, nudging spring away quickly and often charging right through fall, till winter finally gets its act together sometime in December.) To gaze upon a beloved one's reddened cheeks and enjoy the longer nights together. Call me a cheeseball, but that's always seemed romantic to me in its own way, cliche as it is. Not that I've ever had a good relationship myself, wherein I could make the most of such a season. But still, I've had nights when I'd look up at that autumn moon and wonder if the woman I've long loved might not be looking up at that same moon from hundreds of miles away, in another life where she may have forgotten me. We all have days like that, no doubt. Especially those of us challenged in revealing our emotions to others - in particular those held most dear.

And then there's winter, my personal favorite of the seasons. Half the world dies as the other is thoroughly baked in its summer. We don our coats, and our breath hangs in the air as we speak. If we're lucky (Or unlucky, depending on your take.), we'll see snow, as it dances down, canceling schools, complicating commutes, and silently blanketing everything around us. The coldest and by far most somber, and yet simultaneously the most poetic of weather. If you've friends to enjoy the weather with - as nothing can bring out one's long-forgotten youthfulness like sledding, snowball fights, and building snow goons - it can be tremendously fun. If you've a loved one you hold dear, there's no time better to be close than when the world itself is freezing around you, heating up your hearts in contrast. But to the solitary individuals, while beautiful, it can still be one of the loneliest and most depressing of weather. Reflecting the coldness slowly creeping into one's embittered persona. Something I'm working to properly reflect in 27 Days. (Without excessive melodrama, of course.) Winter's a time of extremes, bitterness, passion, depression, happiness, love, and emptiness. Somehow, it only makes sense that our holiday season would fall in the midst of such a time of year, filling those with the necessary criteria with warmth and love, and others with crippling depression and desolation - a season of love and suicide.

What do you love about the seasons and their transitions? Or what about them do you despise? Do you live to throw snowballs, or long for the freezing rain to drive those damn neighbor kids back inside? Does a sandy summer beach make your skin crawl, or does watching fireflies simply ignite your imagination? If anyone's actually reading this (Though considering now new this is, and that I'm still an unpublished nobody, it's unlikely.), present or future, feel free to share your thoughts.